La Coruna

Vega
Hugh and Annie
Fri 24 Jul 2015 10:37
43:22.005N 8:23.131W
Here we are in Marina Coruna having battled our way across the fearsome Bay of Biscay. Well, we did have enough wind to keep the cruising chute inflated on the one day we decided we had to bite the bullet and become familiar with it. And of course its much easier than you fear with a bit of forethought and careful operation. Anticipating every possible (probable) twist, tangle, snag and misalignment in a step by step progression meant it took about an hour to set it but it is well worth the effort and should be much quicker next time.
For me the highlight of the crossing was the night sky. You hear about how wonderful it is when away from the glow of urban light and it really is better than you could ever hope for. We are learning the constellations from a Philips practical astronomy kit. At about midnight the star Vega is directly overhead (our boat is called Vega) and very bright. You can let your imagination and childlike sense of wonder run riot and be entertained for hours. During the course of one night I saw many shooting stars, what I took to be the International Space Station go across (having seen it back home a few times), an incredibly bright Iridium Flash - sunlight reflecting off an Iridium satellite and which was rather ironic given that we have been unable to get the Iridium communication system working. You can look up the times of the space station going over and when Iridium flashes are due, at least my brother in law Rob can, and despite several attempts both in the UK and France had never seen a “flash” before.
Wildlife encountered across Biscay has been rather limited. We had a pod (school?) of Common Bottle Nose dolphins come and check us out, effortlessly diving through the air as they passed.Other than that we had one particular seabird we saw quite often that I cannot identify because I cannot find the Collins bird guide that I thought we had brought with us (larger than a seagull, dark brown on top, white underneath, narrow tail and looking a bit like a small albatross - any ideas?).
There must be fish that of course we cannot see but that attract trawlers because one night we had to steer around a fleet of 20 plus fishing boats spread out over 25 square miles and seeming to move in a coordinated fashion. Most seemed to be Spanish but one was destined for Gdinia (you get this information from the AIS) which suggests something is being hoovered out of Biscay on an international scale. A bit worrying really. Easy to say of course but when you see fishing on this scale in practice it does make you wonder what we are doing to our oceans and its ecosystems.
Other than that we are managing to keep ourselves happy and entertained by keeping watch, worrying about the weather and what might break or go wrong with the boat, working out how our equipment works, working our way through the books of games and puzzles our children gave us and, biggest time consumer of all, completing our blogs. The more astute of you, in fact the one or two who actually read this thing, will have noticed a lot of “Position Update Only” entries.This is because it will be obvious that we don’t sail in a straight line between destinations (including across land) and so I like to put is a reasonable approximation of our actual route on the map. This means entering several coordinates and whilst you can in theory do this on a single email I am finding that one coordinate per email is all the system will manage. When you start to backdate your entries things become complicated because you have to put in the correct date and time sequence for each entry and if necessary edit this on the web site. We are spending hours and hours working out how to do these things with the occasional very grumpy email back to the system providers who, fortunately, are very understanding and tolerant.
For the aficionados Marina Coruna is very large, very new, very empty and very lacking in technical support for which you need to go to the sister marina that is very isolated and out of town.I thought we needed a new part for the boom and was fretting about how to get to the Selden dealer when I discovered via the Selden web site that things appear to be as they should be!
Last night we went into town and walked around a medieval fair/market in the old part. We had some supper and ordered what we thought would be tapas sized portions of fratitas and calamares - each of which turned out to be a meal for four. No wonder the waitress dissuaded us from ordering a third item! Santiago de Compostela tomorrow where there is some big festival going on.