Swimming with the crabs...
A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back
Sam and Alex Fortescue
Tue 28 Sep 2010 18:57
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43:31.79N
007:02.39W Apparently crabs swim in shoals. I didn't know this
until today, but having seen thousands of the beasts swarming around the boat in 100m of open sea, it's true. They kick with
their back legs to move and when you get close to them they swing round to face you and wave their claws menacingly.
They're about two inches long. If anyone with a bit of time on their hands feels like it, perhaps you could google 'crab'
and 'shoal' and email us with an explanation. I'm
expecting several responses from 93 Baker St...
It's been a glorious day. So hot we had to hide in
the shade. There wasn;t a drop of wind, so we motored all the way from Luarca to here, Ribadeo. Luarca turned out to be an
unexpected delight - all shady streets and tall fin-de-siecle buildings, hugger mugger with crooked fishermen's cottages,
sprinkled with sunny bars and sausage shops. Glorious.
We swam midway between, where it was a surprisingly
chilly 18 degrees - a big drop from Santander. Having seen the crabs shoaling earlier and some suspicious fin shapes lolling
in the water, Alex was reluctant to come in and settled for a quick circumnavigation of Summer Song.
We're now anchored halfway down an estuary, by an
empty quay for freighters. It's lovely if you look one way - less so if you look the other. The main criterion is that it's
free. Risotto for supper, after polishing off yesterday's macker/tuna in sandwiches for lunch. We'll go for a dinghy
trip tomorrow morning then head off for Viveiro - near Spain's northernmost tip.
We've got a definite deadline now - Porto by the
15th October, to meet Alexis and Rita. Then Lisbon to meet Marina and finally the Canaries for Team Dorset, so lots of treats in
store. We'll have perfected a recipe for mackerel by then, chaps, so a rousing welcome is guaranteed.
In the meantime, the Gaffer has sent a windlass out
to meet us in La Coruna. The support and telemetry crew is working hard to keep us afloat and moving in the right
direction. Now, if they could only tell me where we stowed the last of the wine...
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