Aft cabin, Cederia - it's raining! 43 39.3 N 08 03.8 W

ALKIRA
Charles & Maggie Bevis
Fri 26 Jul 2013 07:05
After two restful nights in Ribadeo, we left around 10:15 hopeful of some sailing. Destination Cariño.

What is going on with the weather? No sooner are the sails out than the wind decides to shift and it's right on the nose again, so that's another day of motoring ahead of us. The sun is trying to shine but with a considerable amount of cloud around, we're not too hopeful.

The sea is calm and once again, with just the very occasional fishing boat, we seem to have the sea virtually to ourselves. Even the dolphin's weren't interested in checking us out today, although we did spot them on a couple of occasions, not too far away.

During the afternoon, we saw thousands upon thousands of small crabs swimming away from the coast out to sea, as the sea was flat calm they were easy to spot. It was quite a spectacle, the sea was thick with them for some two to three miles, they were about the size of a soup spoon! Seeing something like this is, we think, very unusual. We slowed the boat right down so that we could just drift through them. Hopefully they'll survive long enough to grow in big crabs and now having seen so many, we're confident their numbers are doing well.

This afternoon marked another 'milestone' in our trip as we are no longer heading in westerly direction along the northern coastline, we've now turned part of another corner and for the next day or so we will be heading in a south westerly direction toward La Coruña. From there on we'll be heading south and creeping ever closer to Portugal.

We arrived in Coriño, unfortunately the pontoon that was mentioned in the pilotage books was small and crowded with dozens of small local boats, so no chance for visiting yachts to go alongside. We saw a yacht anchored offshore close to the beach and made our way there thinking we'd be able to drop anchor. After some 30-40 minutes of down anchor/up anchor manoeuvres we realised we wouldn't be stopping in Coriño for the night. Too many rocks and very thick sea weed made it impossible for us to get the anchor to hold. No idea what the other yacht was hanging onto, maybe they were happy to risk dragging!

At 7pm we gave up and dashed out of Coriño to motor further along the coast finally ending up in Cederia.

The coastline from Coriño to Cederia was visually much prettier than that our previous ports of call. There's been a huge amount of money invested along this coastline on wind generators, love 'em or hate 'em, they're here in their hundreds, all topping the hill tops, although quite some distance inland, they're easily visible. We couldn't begin to count them all as they run for miles.

We eventually anchored in Cederia around 9:30 pm and Maggie shot down to the galley to prepare supper. She'd have been happy with a boiled egg, but Charlie was hungry, so full galley slave duties were called for.

A quiet night apart from some unwelcome flies finding their way into the boat and our cabin, fly swat duties for Charlie this morning!

Unfortunately we have woken up to thick cloud, mizzle, but also some unwelcome rain. That hadn't been forecast!

So here we are, being very lazy and staying put for a bit longer. Now at 10am and two cups of coffee later, we are contemplating getting up, but as we motor sailed further than expected yesterday and La Coruña is now that much closer, we're in no rush to leave, hopefully the weather may improve by the time we eventually up anchor.

When we reach La Coruña we have a few tasks to perform before we arrive in Portugal. We've had plenty of warnings about the officials/bureaucracy, so we want to ensure we are as prepared for them as they will be for us. It's a nonsense of course, but something we'll have to endure in all the Portuguese ports so we've been led to understand. With Portugal now in our minds, does anyone know where we can lay our hands on two survival suits at short notice?

Oh dear, it's just started raining again, time for a third cuppa perhaps! Where's the manservant ...

PM - Aha, you thought we were staying in Cedeira for the remainder of the day didn't you? Well so did we, but around 3 o'clock, quite suddenly the weather has shown signs of improvement so we've decided to up anchor and go and take a look outside. If it really is improving, we're going to La Coruña.