Astraia Heads South

We spent the next few weeks making our way west along the northern coast of Spain.  The weather was generally mixed – this is not the area of Spain that people go to for sunshine and beaches – but we did have some lovely days as well as grey ones and some of the scenery was superb. We stopped at many little ports along the way and also the larger towns of Santander, Gijon and A Coruna. We set sail from Bilbao on a grey afternoon.  It was an uneventful trip with little wind and rather ‘loppy’ with the Atlantic swell, so we mostly motored with the mainsail up as a ‘steadying sail’.  The sea always looks much calmer in photos! Laredo and Santona The sun did appear as we anchored in a wonderful bay between Laredo and Santona where we could see horses being exercised on the beach, and where I enjoyed an early morning swim – well, before breakfast anyway, not necessarily all that early! A brightly-painted fishing boat heading out to sea. ...

The rain in Spain falls mainly on … Bilbao! There’s an old adage – the three most useless things on a sailing boat are “a retired naval officer, an umbrella and a wheelbarrow”.   Well, we don’t have a wheelbarrow but the retired naval officer and the umbrella have been pretty useful!   It has rained so hard at times along this coast, but it’s very unpredictable – one minute it’s blazing sunshine, the next torrential rain!   We definitely need the umbrella every time we go ashore. Sometimes the view from the marina was like this …. And an hour later it was glorious sunshine and looked like this. Or there’d be sun and rain together and a rainbow would appear. Here are three versions of exactly the same view in very different weather conditions – these photos were all taken within a few hours of each other!   You can’t even see the hill in the first one! Torrential rain A watery sun peeping through Glorious sunshin...