When I was a child the Bay of Biscay was a term that conjured up tempestuous seas, with even big ships struggling to battle across it. 

So when we have glibly said to our friends “Oh we are going to the Lorient Boat Show and then heading down to Spain”, whilst I might have seemed relaxed about it, there was always this nagging worry.  As it has turned out, we had north-easterly winds for the first part of the crossing, the wind then died altogether and swung round to 10 knots on the nose, which meant motoring for the last ten hours. So it has been a very benign, nay tedious crossing, for which I am grateful.  John, of course, just happily takes it all in his stride, for which I am also very grateful:  when we are at sea I definitely gain comfort from his confidence.

Seasickness is an odd thing.  It is so debilitating – not the physical retching, but the way your legs barely support the weight of your body and how your rational becomes distorted so that your judgement changes:  “Oh there’s a line chafing – well I’ll sort it out a bit later” – dangerous thinking.  You long just to sleep and a three hour watch painfully ticks by minute by minute. I have always suffered from seasickness and would love to find a way of overcoming it. I have tried tablets which put me to sleep; patches that make me feel odd; acupressure points that I can never quite find; ginger that I can’t keep down, and sitting under a tree – which is brilliant, but doesn’t get you very far. I have also tried ignoring it. For this trip I gave myself a good talking to and in my head I felt fine – to begin with at least, but my body was having none of it and I kept being repeatedly sick.  If anyone as got any solutions please let me know. People say that after two or three days you are fine, but that doesn’t help for the first sixty or so hours of any trip.  Oh well, at least it makes coast hopping and exploring ashore all the more special.

Arriving at Viveiro in the dark was not a problem.  The trusty Chart Plotter is fantastic and it never ceases to impress me.  We are now on the northern Galician coast and, according to the cruising companion book Vivero is the easternmost of the large Rias Altas – a high, rugged, wooded landscape, hill behind hill, each overlapping another and each of a different hue and clarity.

The locals, being Galician rather than Spanish, pronoun their town Bebeido, so our first attempt at speaking Spanish in the tourist office wasn’t a lot of use.  It is a working port, with a huge fish depot, plus canning and freezing plants.  Trucks, carrying numerous lengths of logs seem to trundle through the town all day.  There has been a lot of apartments building in recent years and some EU investment in civic buildings, but the town does seem to have lost its pride a bit.  However, the O Muro restaurant (the only one with an English translation of the menu – yes, I know, it’s chickening out), really excelled itself in listing new and exciting dishes: Scrambled eggs with caviar of hedgehogs; Young Lamb’s fresh little chops; Tail of Bull stewed in his juice with Garrison; and Hake with sea urchin sauce.  Sadly, a bit like the town, the reality of the meal didn’t quite match the promise of the menu, but we enjoyed wandering around the old town centre, people watching and pressing our noses up to the shop windows.

We are using the Yachting Monthly North West Spain Cruising Companion by Detlef Jens and, although researched ten years ago, it very good. The next place we are heading to is ‘Page 164’ about 40 miles along the coast.