A Coruna to Cascais

Our blog has us still in A Coruna, yet here we are are in Porto Santo...I can only explain that there are plenty of other things to do! 

We left A Coruna with little wind, what there was filling in from the west, so it was more motor-sailing for us.  It was another fine day, and we were thrilled to have (at least) nine dolphins playing around the bow wave within an hour or two of leaving.  They stayed for a while, rolling over as if to look up at us. We had planned an overnight passage, but on rounding the cape and heading south there was an uncomfortable chop which slowed us right down.  We didn't fancy a night of that (although there was no way of telling whether it was just a local effect) and Corme, a small fishing village with a concrete breakwater sheltering the anchorage, was just an hour or so away.  We arrived just before dark and stayed there for the night, definitely a good decision.

Dolphin!

From Corme it was a long day's sail (okay, motor..) to Muros, where we anchored across from the white-housed town.  It was a pleasant place to wander around for a day or two, with old buildings spreading up the hill, but there wasn't too much to detain us.

A Coruna

We had a lazy first day in Spain.  It was brilliant to wake up and see that we were really there.  In contrast to the murky weather of the day before, there was a blue sky and bright sun: all, in fact, that one might hope for.  The wind was still in the west, so we happily opted for a rest day rather than continuing immediately to A Coruna.  We felt less tired than we had after our cross-channel passage, pleasingly, but lazing in the cockpit reading definitely seemed like the way forward.  We thought about getting the dinghy out to explore ashore, but it all seemed like too much effort... We finished off the champagne, and watched locals coming and going in their small fishing boats, and lay in the sun.  I went for a swim.  It was freezing, but worth it.

Fishing boat, Ria de Cedeira

The wind was still in the west the following day, but had fallen light, so we got the anchor up and headed out of the Ria.  A fisherman gesticulated frantically at us as we neared the point; apparently he had nets out between the shore and the boat, so we went round in a wide circle to keep clear. Pot buoys and nets are a bit of a hazard round here.  It was interesting to see the reddish-brown, high cliffs we had glimpsed so little of on arrival.

Biscay

Biscay has something of a reputation.  Partly this is due to the kinds of seas that can be thrown up near the continental shelf - where the seabed plunges steeply from one or two hundred metres down to well over a thousand - and the fact that the Biscay coast has few harbours of refuge, becoming a massive lee shore in a westerly gale.  This would also be our first really long passage in Limbo.  On the other hand, I told myself, the 330 miles or so from Camaret to A Coruna was only slightly over three times the distance we'd recently covered from Dartmouth to L'Aber Wrac'h.  Neither was there much chance of meeting a westerly gale, given the promising forecast.  This indicated a fresh north-easterly which would gradually decrease before fading out completely and going round to the south towards the end of the (we hoped) three-day passage.  My main concern was whether the wind would hold for long enough; but even with our fuel capacity, we could still motor for a couple of days if we had to.

Ready to tackle Biscay (we hope).