Position:  43:32.39N 07:02.19W

Ribadeo, Spain

If you stay too long in any harbour you get port rot, and after four nights in Gijon we had to drag ourselves away from the delights of this lovely town and back to sea.  The Northern coast of Spain is not endowed with lots of safe harbours and sailing really isn’t anything like as big a sport as it was in France; consequently you hardly see any other yachts and the facilities are quite far apart.

The next reasonable-size harbour to the West of Gijon is Ribadeo, the first of the Rias Altas, which are a series of drowned rivercourses which indent the coastline of NW Spain (and make it such an attractive cruising ground).  Ribadeo is a 60-mile straightline coastal sail from Gijon, so we set off earlyish with an Easterly forecast and headed Westwards.

The sail was hard and fast – hard because of the competing NW and SW swell of about 2m making for some steep and nasty waves, and fast because the wind picked up to F6 gusting 7 from behind us, coupled with a 0.5kt current flowing westwards.  We pretty-much sailed along the 100m depth contour about 3M offshore and with the help of the DVD player in the cockpit for the girls, we sailed into the relative shelter of the ria after 10hrs. 

To get in, you have to sail under a high roadbridge and as the girls were wondering whether Nutmeg would fit underneath, Sarah & I noticed a RIB, which had zoomed past us earlier with 5 or 6 young kids in it, in difficulty and drifting onto the rocks under the bridge.  We quickly turned and with only enough water for a single pass, managed to get a warp to the RIB and towed them into the marina.  They were very grateful and it turned out that the RIB driver worked at the marina!  Unfortunately that didn’t translate into a discount for our berthing..

We felt we deserved some alcohol after our hard day so wandered into the town, which is an odd place – in need of some investment is probably the best way to summarise it.  We found a restaurant and I ordered what I thought was a jug of white wine but which had a head on it when it turned up and was clearly cider.  By halfway down the jug the difference was irrelevant!