37:12.7N 07:24.4W Ayamonte Marina

Friday 18^th September. Six years to the day since we were married in Oakham on a fabulous sunny day. The weather today is the same and with little wind we are having to motor.

The pilot book says Ayamonte has Greek origins although we did not stay long enough to find out what they were. We found a clean, pretty town decorated with coloured tiles on walls seats and plinths. The ambience is softened with swaying palm trees some having jasmine trained around them like a sweet smelling skirt. In the car-less streets various small shops thrived and satisfied the relaxed and interested gaze of the locals and visitors. We bought some red fabric to repair our small ensign in a well stocked fabric shop. Cool narrow streets led to clean open plazas full with well dressed people of all ages.

One little girl wore a dark blue chiffon dress with a white lace collar and an elderly lady in mid blue caught Rob’s attention, “Look hun, she’s wearing a coat dress.”

We sat at a bar in the main Plaza la Laguna and watched hundreds of children playing on wheels. Scooters, roller skates and blades whizzed around and sometimes took a tumble only to get up again very quickly so as not to lose face. Something I have not seen for years but to which I was party when I was young, was pairs of girls ‘walking out together’ pushing their custom built dolls prams just like mum.

A little boy was mesmerised by the accordion player and jiggled and clapped to the rhythm to the delight of his mother and us voyeurs. We lingered in the happy atmosphere of it all and imagined what it would be like to live in an apartment overlooking this social, pleasant place.

Back at the marina we chatted with a Dutch couple who live aboard their steel yacht which they fitted out themselves for their own circum-navigation from 1981 to 1988. We pondered on how the world has changed. Then they called in along the north Caribbean coast of Venezuela and missed crime ridden Colombia, we will be doing the opposite since the Colombian Government in ‘clearing up’ their country have pushed many of their gangs into Venezuela which is now a very troubled place to live.

Overnight I watched a dredger at work in the marina under a starlit sky and a lorry arrived to empty the waste bins automatically in seconds while the population slept. A well loved and cared for little place, Ayamonte, it is the western most seaside town in southern Spain.