We moved on from Combarro to the town of Cangas which we also visited on our last voyage south.  It is up the Ria de Vigo and has a good beach off which we anchored again after a three hour motor.  The beach was very busy as the sun was warm and it was the weekend.  However the water still didn’t seem particularly warm to us at 17C and we were impressed by how long the locals spent bobbing around in it - guess they breed them hardy up here in Galicia.  We had another delicious meal of the regional specialities in town in the evening but hadn’t taken the range of the tides into account sufficiently when tying our dinghy to the harbour wall and had to wade through the oozing mud to get to it afterwards. 

We did assuage our consciences about all the eating we have been doing here with a couple of runs along the beach, the second being on Sunday morning before we headed for Bayona - only about 12 miles away and at the southern end of the rias bajas (lower rias).  We absolutely love Bayona.  It has a beautiful setting with an old fort on the headland and the local and quite fancy yacht club tucked up underneath it between two pretty beaches.  Unfortunately the yacht club berthing fees seem to have gone up quite a bit since we were last here (€30 last time, €78 this time for a 20% bigger boat!) so we can’t afford to linger too long.  We had a great little run around the headland this morning and climbed up to the “Virgin of the Rock”.   It is a very large statue of the virgin holding a boat which you can climb up inside for an even better view out to sea.  We just admired her from below and then felt justified later in having a second breakfast in a café en route to shop for Spanish goodies in the supermarket.

We’ve had windless conditions since arriving, but tonight there is a forecast for 24hrs of fair winds, but then nothing until a southerly storm on Saturday.  As much as we’d like to enjoy Bayona for a few more days, we feel we should take the brief winds to make some progress down the Portugese coast.  We’ll have to decide where to wait out the southerly nearer the time, but another stretch of motoring to get us down to the Algarve coast seems on the cards.  We spent yesterday evening with a couple of guys on another Contest – they have motored all the way from the UK and seem to think they will have to motor all the way to Madeira as well!  In an odd coincidence he had just bought his Contest 40 in the Netherlands in April, and was having quite a few niggles with it as well!  By common consent we won the “worst Contest problems” competition though.