Hola! After a few weeks in Portugal, we are now back in Spain! The Portuguese coast was very beautiful but also very straight, meaning that it didn’t offer many sheltered anchoring possibilities and that we mostly went to harbors. Although harbors are nice every now and then and make visiting cities more convenient, we usually prefer the isolated atmosphere provided by anchorages.
We were therefore very happy to arrive in Galicia (northern Spain), which offers superb anchorages along a beautiful and very irregular coastline. We spent a week at different anchorage in Galicia and enjoyed spending more time with friends. First, our friends Simon and Franzi, who had left us in Porto, couldn’t get enough of boat life and came back to see us there, and then, Louis’ friend Paul joined us for a long weekend 😊
The week at anchorages was a mixture between beach and bathing fun on warmer days, and hiking on cooler days. One of the hikes actually included the end of a variant of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Fisterra!
You might be wondering how we’re coping with the ongoing heat wave…well, we have to say: come to northern Spain, temperatures don’t go higher than 23° this week! Despite that, we sadly saw some wildfires during one of our night sails…
These colder temperatures in Galicia and northern Spain came with quite a bit of fog and Misty Sea was happy to navigate in her name-giving environment (we were less happy about it though). But we have to admit that misty landscapes have something magical about them, especially on land!
Another great point is that the good winds are FINALLY back! On Monday and Tuesday, we had winds coming from behind (instead of the wind coming from up front that we’d had since Gibraltar). We seized the opportunity and had a nice 48h DOWNWIND sail to Gijón, which is a city in the center of the northern Spanish coast. We had almost forgotten what it is like to sail in good winds blowing in the right direction: it is a lot faster, less frustrating, and accompanied by waves pushing you in the right direction rather than breaking your entire speed since waves usually follow the wind’s direction.
We’re going to stay in Gijón for the next few days. We’ll rest from the journey, do some maintenance work on the boat, and hopefully do a bit of climbing and surfing.
Then, the plan is to sail across the Bay of Biscay either directly from Gijón or from a bit further west. This crossing should take us around 48h and bring us to the area of the Ile d’Oléron in France, where we hope to arrive by the end of July. We expect to stay in France for 2-3 weeks before heading to southern England. In France, we’ll meet Sara’s mum and sister, and potentially some last-minute visitors from Paris 🙂
Just like bad news, good news also don’t come alone, so we already have a good weather window to cross the Bay of Biscay starting on Sunday. Although it looks like we’re following the coastline, crossing the Bay of Biscay is known as a serious challenge and similar to a sea crossing: not only because of the peculiar wind and waves pattern that can occur but also because the lack of harbors along the french south coast forces sailors to do a trip of at least 250km without possible halts. In our case, this will probably be a 400km stretch in a single go! Wish us luck and we’ll see you on the other side 😉
Sailing Misty 