11th August

Monday 11^th August 2008. 43° 36’.97 N, 008° 18’.63 W. 15 miles NE of Coruña.

I have just put my first batch of on-board bread to prove, the lap-top has been set up so that it can safely be used at sea, and I can settle to writing up the blog for the first time since we left. Finally, we are getting into the routine of this ship-board life, and sailing the boat is not taking up all our time and attention.

We’ve had a hectic time since leaving our home port just over three weeks ago. There were a large number of miles to cover to get to our objective of the Atlantic coast of Spain, and the weather has not been kind. But we should be in Coruña tonight, and then we shall be able to settle into the slightly slower, more meditative – and perhaps more enjoyable, even? life we had planned.

The Bay of Biscay deserves its evil reputation, in our first experience of it. Thank heavens we shouldn’t need to cross it again for some time. We had intended – perhaps hoped would have been a better word in hindsight – to go straight across from Plymouth to Coruña, taking four or five days over it, and arriving before the end of July. 10 days later, we are still travelling, still hopefully… As the gull flies, it is 450 miles between these two cities; we have covered 862 and are not there yet.

The problem has been the wind – too much of it, most of the time, and from the wrong direction. We left Plymouth on Monday 28^th July in perfect conditions: the sun sparkled on the waves, the wind came briskly from the north-west, and within a few minutes of clearing the outer breakwater we had the cruising chute up, and had set course for Ushant.

The English coastline ran parallel with our course, so we saw our last of it at around midday. Philippe made a wonderful salade niçoise – what a wonderful crew member, to turn up with a rucksackful of ingredients, even including foie gras – and the first night watch went below to have an early nap, while Tomia sailed at 5-7 knots on her course. So far, so very much according to plan.

Within a few hours, this idyll was over: the wind rose steadily as night fell, the waves mounted, we crashed into them repeatedly as we tried to stay on our course, and quite soon three out of the four on board were thoroughly seasick.

Ploughing into a rising sea, feeling rotten, is not something you do unless you have to, so with the early morning shipping forecast telling us only that more of the same was on the way, we turned for shelter in Camaret, on the south coast of Brittany.

The following morning, Tuesday, we set off again at midday, but once again the wind got up, and mounted continuously, and by Thursday afternoon, when we were well out into the Bay, we had a full gale force 8. This is uncomfortable sailing, to say the least, particularly as we were heading close into it: the boat rises up on each on-coming wave, then crashes down on the other side, being stopped in her tracks each time. Those on watch in the cockpit are soaked by salt water crashing over the deck, over the spray hood, and then bang into our faces, or down the back of the neck, while working to steer the boat, and adjust the sails. Those below meanwhile find it hard to get any rest, as the mast and the hull magnify the noises of the boat slamming into the waves. To add to the general misery, all the contents of the boat: clothes, cushion covers, bedding, gradually get inundated with salt water, which never really dries out.

In the middle of this maelstrom, we had the slightly surreal experience of listening to the soothing tones of Jonathan Agnew and the rest of the Radio 4 long-wave test match team, while we waited for the shipping forecast. In the gaps between overs, they maundered pleasantly on about previous great innings, that afternoon’s cake, the quality of the pitch, whether it was wise to place the gullies quite so close together … we clung on in our personal chaos, pencil and paper in hand, waiting to find out if there was any chance of the wind abating and our lives becoming a bit easier.

One joy was the first appearance of dolphins, which danced around the bows, and performed wheeling jumps in unison. Three of them would leap out of the sea together, each one a split second after the other, and turn a perfect third of a circle before re-entering neatly, still holding the formation. It is so easy to think, in our anthropocentric way, of them putting on a show for us, or at least attempting some sort of interaction – they may well be reacting to our presence, but more likely because the sound of our passing attracts fish to the surface: the dolphins’ presence is also attended by a flock of gulls.

We were being thrown about so much below that we didn’t have sufficient weight to keep our footing on the lovingly varnished floorboards. Cooking became a daring balancing act, and boiling a kettle and passing a mug of hot soup up to the cockpit an exercise in acrobatics – frankly, it was no fun at all, and once again we decided to turn in towards the safety of land, this time Les Sables d’Olonne, just north of La Rochelle.

Within a couple of hours’ sailing we were out of the worst of the gale, and the sun had come out. With the wind now on our quarter, sailing became much easier. We were surfing down great, deep turquoise rollers, their breaking crests a mosaic of green and white, like shattered plate glass. As they rose up behind us, they looked as if they would break over our stern, but Tomia just floated up on them, receiving a burst of speed from each one as they passed underneath.

We arrived in Les Sables on Friday 1^st August, having covered a very uncomfortable 268 miles in 2½ days. We were all tired, so decided against pressing on down the coast; Corin and Phil changed their departure airport and left for England on Saturday. We shopped in the covered market, and swam in the Atlantic rollers off the 3 mile long beach, and waited for an electrician to arrive to do some work on the Navtex and wind generator.

Anthony and I set off again on Tuesday 5^th August, once again with the intention of reaching La Coruña. About 90 miles off shore, we sailed calmly off the 4,000m high cliff that is the continental shelf. The sea out here is blue, blue, blue. Not the muddy greeny blue of the east coast, not turquoise; just a deep clear profound blue. The spray from the bows shows up sparkling white against it, and we can see the eddies of air bubbles our passage creates spiralling down and down.

On the Wednesday, suddenly, a whale! (Well, we think it was.) A great grey-brown back, like a submerged elephant; a whoosh from the blow-spout; it (they?) puffed solidly past a hundred yards or so behind our stern, going north out into the bay.

Overnight, the chart plotter suddenly developed the habit of turning itself off and then on again. We turned on the secondary GPS, and then spent 12 hours going through every permutation of turning it on and off again, checking the wiring, checking every connection checking the voltage for power spikes, turning off the auto pilot, leaving the whole set-up for an hour to cool down, turning everything on again in a different sequence …

On the second night the wind got up again to force 6 gusting 7, and came around more into the SW, the direction we were trying to head in. We reefed and plugged on, with rain showers pelting in, the wind strengthening under each one, totally obscuring the coast and the light of Cabo Peñas on the northern Spanish coast. As dawn broke, we decided against tacking out into the Bay once more, and made for the small sheltered anchorage of Ensenada de Artedo. A Spanish landfall at last, even if not the one we intended.

We paused a day here, and swam and napped, and then set off for Ribadeo, 40 miles along the coast. This part of Spain, northern Galicia, doesn’t look at all as I expected. It is green and lush and rolling, with granite outcrops breaking through –and very rainy, even in August – professor Higgins got it wrong! Across the bay from where we sat at anchor was a church with an onion dome – the overall impression was a cross between Austria and Devon.

Ribadeo provided us with cafés, shops and, most importantly, the chance to amble aimlessly without any particular plan or target. The town feels like past glories rather than a thriving present, as the fishing trade dies off and other industries, mainly tourism, have not yet taken its place. Only a few streets from the harbour, crumbling shells of buildings, with weeds growing thickly up through the beams, held up by their neighbours, advertise themselves “Se Vende”; despite their remains of ornate balconies or carved door frames, there aren’t many takers.

That evening, we crossed the ria to Castropol, and feasted on grilled gambas, heavily salted and lightly garlicked, and sat licking our fingers while the passegiata went back and forth in front as night fell.

After 48 hours here, we set off for the next stop, a small town so miserable I daren’t name it. Suffice to say that it is the ugliest place I have been since Bucharest, just after the fall of Ceaucescu. Bleak concrete house-blocks clawed up the hillside, and the place appeared deserted. A ton of public money appeared to have been thrown at the town, but resulting only in two large modern expensive-looking buildings on the front: a health centre and a large town hall. One can only hope that at least the work went to local businesses. Our view of the town may have been jaundiced by the rather lumpy seven hour sail we had to get there, in grey rain and wind, which was as usual bang on the nose, enlivened only by a pod of dolphins as we came in across the bay.