Cedeira to Coruña

We left Cedeira after a roly night in this otherwise pleasant anchorage. We had little wind and ended up having to motor all the way to the narrow entrance of El Ferrol, opposite Coruña. This is an important Spanish naval harbour and has been for centuries. However the Spaniards seem very much more relaxed than 28 years ago. Then we saw armed soldiers in the towns...these days we are lucky to see a policeman!

We anchored close to the Fort St Felipe which guards the narrows into the ria, in a similar way to Hurst Castle guards the entrance to the Solent. We went ashore and wandered through the hillside village and visited the castle. It has been added to over the years and it was interesting trying to decipher the Spanish descriptions and work out what all the different buildings were for. It was clearly an important military base until relatively recently. It's main claim to fame seems to be having repulsed the English in an attack in about 1807. The thing that most impressed me were these enormous anchors that held a chain that completely closed the narrows in time of war.

Clearly the saint does her bit because we asked a fisherman on the bank if he'd caught anything and he showed us 3 unusual looking creatures which we think were John Dories. In the morning there were a lot of local small boats out with small hand operated dredges on the end of booms about 10 metres long hauling up what we think were clams.

The peace of the anchorage was disrupted intermittently by explosions that gradually increased until about 10 o'clock,when the sky over a distant village erupted into a mass of very loud fireworks. We had earlier seen a procession of local boats and it turned out that it was a fiesta for a saint important to the fishing communities of this region

 The forecast was for the wind to blow up to gale force from the south west so we decided to go to Coruña earlier than intended. The fore cast was dead right with rain and strong winds for the next 3 days.