Friday 17 September 2010   44:45.00N   07:22.00

Fabulous day, wind NE F5-6 on the quarter, surfing over 10kn at times. Brilliant sun, good view of Galicia coast in the afternoon with big cliffs and big fires maybe two miles long – burning stubble? Right season as Richard pointed out, but we were later told these were wild fires mainly started deliberately as seems to be the case elsewhere (Greece…)  Along the coast in the dark, pesky German freighter only altered course after two VHF calls. For those non sailors, we have AIS (Automatic Identification System) which shows every boat equipped with such on our plotter screen which is at the helm, with amazing detail, name of vessel, size, speed, course, where you are expected to be sunk by it (!), etc. The good thing is that all commercial vessels are required to have it, and nearly all sailing boats of any size have it as well. A noisy alarm goes off if any boat is likely to be a problem. We also have Radar which shows up on the same screen if you want to se it.