Ribadeo

Went into the town to look around and shop to replace diminishing stores.

Ribadeo town is a mixture of past elegance, falling into disrepair and in some cases falling down, contrasted with modern houses and blocks of flats. There is an extremely nice square with flowers, box hedging, and a fountain; this dominated by a wonderful building with cupola and a splendid shining roof, elaborate weather vane, balconies and beautiful windows, porticos but windows are broken and tufts of grass are appearing here and there . Other old and characterful buildings are in a similar state, some much, much worse; if something isn't done soon these attractive pieces of historic architecture will be lost.

But hey, this is Spain – mañana.

Went to a specialist fish restaurant and it was truly excellent with every sort of shell or squidgy and rubbery, large & small fish you can think of (well perhaps not the poisonous ones or others too diabolical to eat). It was absolutely excellent, we were suffering a 'protein high' by the time we got back to the boat. The tradition in this part of Galicia is to drink white wine, poured from a great height, into wide mouthed cups much like the cider cups in Brittany. The high level pouring aerates the wine and brings out the flavour, it was delicious. We slept rather well.

Have now anchored out having availed ourselves of marina resources for 2 days. We are anchored off a series of small beaches (the sand is quite dark compared with east coast UK), surrounded by short rocky cliffs full of large dark caves – a child's paradise as the beach shelves slowly and water is tranquil at the moment.

 This ria has shoals of sand which apparently move about underwater, much like Deben or Ore river entrances, consequently all printed charts are out of date, we are relying on local info and eyeball navigation and hope that we make it through the night without spinning around into one of the shoals – we shall see.

We are also close to this rather grotty but clearly still working shipyard.