Finisterre
Persephone... Cruiser/Racer
Nigel & Karen Goodhew...
Fri 1 Jul 2016 12:49
Sitting here, writing to you has caused me to reflect a little on the last couple of days. We had a lovely evening with Gillian and Neil from "Silver Lining" their Hanse 411, after they anchored close to us in Camarinas. Then as we were enjoying the slightly sparkling rose wine together, in swung Dave and Mike on "Sapphire" whom we met in La Coruna. So off we sped in the dinghy to swop stories and find out how it was that we had leapfrogged them. Several beers / red wines later, the full story was clear...and it was all about blocked heat exchangers, hot engines and an unscheduled return to la Coruna to sort it all out....
So this morning, we woke up early...ish...and set off in oily calm, to Finisterre....an unchallenging 20 something miles. But as we left the Ria Camarinas, and met the proper Atlantic waves, Persephone began to roll, and we started to see water in our previously bone dry bilge. The water was coming into the boat through a hole cut in the matrix for a pipe which serves the bilge pump, of all things. And the level of the hole was such that it became clear that our stiffening matrix under the floor, was pretty much half full of water. So Nigel broke the semi permanent drain holes from the matrix into the central bilge, and spent a happy hour and a half, sponging out 6 washing up bowls of water, until the bilge was dry again.
The waterways arguably brackish....not fully salt, or fully fresh. And it was a translucent brown, suggesting it had been around in the boat for some time....perhaps the whole winter!
It's gone now, the sun has come out metaphorically and literally, and we will need to monitor any ingress to asses the degree of concern we should adopt.
Rounding Finisterre was dramatic. The headland was shrouded in fog or low cloud as we approached, but everything cleared up nicely for our actual rounding...and now we are properly on a southbound track.
I am no scholar, but will attest to the medieval attribution to this place as the finis terre....the end of the earth. This was the westernmost limit of the known world, until the likes of Christopher Columbus and Vasco de Gama, started to sail away to the west to find the actual edge....and stumbled across the New World in so doing.....
Current position;
42 54.613N 009 15.525W
N
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