🇫🇷 Buoyage of Lorient: put the harbour's buoys back (France)
© OpenStreetMap · ODbL · Simplified map, not for navigation.
This chart shows the real buoyage of Lorient (France), taken from OpenStreetMap on 2026-10-03. 5 marks are missing. IALA region A: coming in from the sea, red to port and green to starboard.
What the chart shows
The Lorient chart gathers 13 marks taken from OpenStreetMap: ten lateral marks (six starboard-hand, three port-hand, one preferred channel mark), two cardinals (north and west) and one special mark. Five spots are empty: both cardinals, two starboard marks and one port mark. OpenStreetMap calls the north cardinal “Pâté du Cheval” and one starboard mark “Banc du Turc”.
Lorient lies in IALA region A: coming in from seaward, red stays to port and green to starboard. Recommendation R1001 numbers marks in that direction, even numbers on red and odd numbers on green: M3 and M5, starboard-hand, are odd, while A8, port-hand, is even. A cardinal mark is passed on the side its name indicates: safe water lies to the north of a north cardinal.
The navigation charter for the ports and roads of Lorient says that in a harbour entrance channel traffic keeps to the right in principle, vessels passing port to port, and that a listening watch on VHF channel 16, alone or with channel 9, is compulsory during manoeuvres in the marina. The roads’ sociocultural atlas describes them as the shared estuary of the Blavet, the Scorff and the Ter.
Revision questions in the spirit of the exam
- Which side do you leave a green lateral mark on when coming into harbour in region A?
- Is a mark whose name ends in 5 a port-hand or a starboard-hand mark?
- Which side do you pass a north cardinal on, and why?
Sources
- IALA, Recommendation R1001 (ed. 2.0, June 2023) (facts restated in our own words, text not reproduced)
- OpenStreetMap and OpenSeaMap, survey of 03/10/2026 (ODbL 1.0 licence)
- Navigation charter for the ports and roads of Lorient (ports-paysdelorient.fr) (facts restated in our own words, text not reproduced)
- Lorient Agglomération, presentation booklet of the sociocultural atlas of the Lorient roads (facts restated in our own words, text not reproduced)
For practice only: do not use for navigation. Refer to up-to-date official charts and documents.
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Data: © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the ODbL 1.0, including seamarks from the OpenSeaMap project. The derived database behind these charts is published under the ODbL: real-zones.json (ODbL), ODbL 1.0. Simplified map, not for navigation.