Position:  43:07.60N 09:10.93W

Camarinas, Spain

In the morning of 3^rd Sept, we woke and checked the forecast.  Coruna coastguard had issued a gale warning which kicked in at 1500 on the 4^th, for SW gale 8 to severe gale 9.  So if we wanted to leave in the next week, we needed to go today, before the gale arrived.  Mum and Al were due to leave in a taxi to the airport at 1200, but we had a 58-mile sail to do, to a harbour which recommended that night entry was not attempted by first-timers.  Given it gets dark at 2030-2100, we needed to leave as early as possible to get in before dark – at a 5-kt average this would be a 12-hr sail.

Mum and Al very graciously moved off the boat at 1000 and after a goodbye, went for showers and a coffee.  We filled Nutmeg with diesel - €200-worth (last fill-up in Les Sables) and at 1030 were underway, motoring out into a drizzly grey mist.  For the first time in I don’t know how long, I wore my full foul-weather kit and switched the radar on – visibility was only a couple of miles. 

After clearing the ria, we headed West and were shortly joined by a warship, who held station about a mile to the North, and tracked us for an hour.  I think he was guarding a firing zone – there had been a Navtex warning about firing practice in a zone to the North of Coruna.  Strangely the warship had no distinguishing marks – no name, no flags.

It feels like Autumn here.  All the locals we have spoken to say that this has been a crap summer – which is how it sounds it has been in England too – so everyone can take some comfort to hear that we have not escaped the rubbish weather by heading South. There is time yet, however!!

This really was yucky weather, and it did not stop drizzling all day.  We zipped up the cockpit so at least had a modicum of dryness but inevitably it got wet from our keeping a lookout, and it was cold too.  We saw some dolphins, who jumped to have a look at us, but didn’t bother stopping to play.  It was not a day for playing.

This piece of coast is pleasantly called the Costa Del Morte due to the high number of unlucky souls who have perished in shipwrecks here.  Facts like these don’t exactly make you want to linger.  Luckily there was a reasonable breeze from the NE so we managed to keep up a high average until we turned SW after Islas Sisargias, when the apparent wind just wasn’t enough to keep the sails filled.  We motorsailed the rest of the way and at 1900, Cabo Villano suddenly appeared off the port bow out of the mist – an eerie sight as it was quite close by. 

Camarinas is tucked into a ria just after Cabo Villano, so after a little pilotage we came out of the  swell and into a beautiful ria which, given the low cloud and drizzle, could have been Western Scotland.  We tied up at 2000 having done the 58 miles in 9½ hrs.  It was so cold that we put the heating on!

The girls take advantage of the heating and make a den

The following day was a day off and as I write this at 2200, the wind is whistling in the rigging as the storm rages outside.  The forecasters got this one right and I suspect we will be up in the night, checking the warps.  I would summarise Camarinas as a place that was nice but hasn’t really seen any investment for at least 10 years.  It seems to be a bit of a theme along this coastline. 

Update – that was some storm!  I am glad we were safely in a marina.  We left the wind instruments on and the maximum we saw overnight was 43.6kts.  We got up a few times to check warps etc but it was all fine, just very noisy.  Another boat in the marina reckons he saw 59kts but this sounds a little extreme.  Our wind generator, which I left running, was looking like it was going to take off – we weren’t short of power!  The local papers have been showing pictures of lots of boats that had blown ashore, with a caption of 140km/h winds – so it sounds like it was a bad one for the whole of Galicia.