You may spend every holiday on a beach, watching the sea. You may travel to the same place every year and have the feeling that you know it by heart. But you will discover this place once again, if you change your point of view. Indeed, you may know every piece of land, once you’re looking at it from the sea, everything looks different.

That’s the feeling I get when I first spend my holiday on yacht. I saw the Mediterranean Sea before, I was familiar with the French cost and Corse but, everything looked different from the sea.  My journey started in the port of Saint Mandrier-sur-Mer, a charming little town near Toulon. In fact, people in St Mandrier often worked in Toulon and took the sea shuttle every morning to get from their homes to their jobs. Lovely way of starting a day I think. Saint Mandrier is a typical south French town, houses painted in warm colours, lot of flower, excellent little restaurants and nice and relaxed people. A perfect place to start your holiday.  One less typical point of the city is the military presence: indeed there is a military base next to the town, with restricted access for civilians of course, but you can still admire some military equipment exposed, as well as a military ship docked near the port.

Sunset on the french coast

To begin, we spend a couple of days (re)discovering the French coast from the sea. We first stopped and the island of Porquerolles. It is a charming place, with a lot of things to discover. It is also accessible by sea shuttle, so there was a lot of tourists. We then moved to the island of Port Croz, which is a national park. It’s an amazing place! So peaceful… There are only few inhabitants and maybe one small restaurant. There is no electricity in the port and the phone signal is hard to get so you are somehow isolated from the rest of the world. The island is covered with a beautiful forest you can explored, and we did. The landscape is breath-taking if you go around the island. Sometimes you have amazing views on an incredible blue sea. The next day, we took the direction of Saint Tropez and we set the sails. There wasn’t much wind, so we needed three days to get to Saint Tropez. During our trip, we meet only few people, discover some amazing places impossible to reach from land and we enjoyed the sun and the excellent temperature of the water for swim. We slept at anchor and enjoyed the calm and the silence. However, as we were getting close to Saint Tropez, we met more and more people, on yachts, boats and sometimes even big private boats with a helicopter on the top! An impressive view. We decided to stay for the night in the Marina of Port Grimaud. Best decision ever! It is an amazing place, so charming that we did not wanted to left. It is like a mini-Venice. People who have their houses there, instead of having a parking place for their car, have on for their boat! We spend the next day discovering the city on Saint Tropez, also a very nice place.