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Showing posts from July, 2018

Blog 17: The Costa da Morte and Cape Finisterre

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So at last we have almost reached the ‘corner’, i.e. the north-west tip of Spain which early explorers thought was the end of the earth – Cape Finisterre.  But before that we have to negotiate the Costa da Morte, which translates from Galician as the ‘Coast of Death’!  It is so named because there have been many shipwrecks along its treacherous rocky shore, which is exposed directly to the Atlantic Ocean.  It stretches from just after A Coruña to Muros, beyond Cape Finisterre and has few harbours and little shelter. Unfortunately the forecast is not good enough for us to set out today – the Atlantic swell is still too high.  But the marina in A Coruña is so ‘loppy’ when ships go past that we might as well go and anchor somewhere while we wait for the weather to improve – it’ll probably be calmer and certainly cheaper! It was quite rough even within the sheltered waters of the Ria in which A Coruña is situated, so we made the right decis...

Blog 16: The Northern Spanish Coast Part 4 – Ribadeo to A Coruña

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Ribadeo We had a nice sail to Ribadeo, with the wind in the right direction for a change! It’s cloudy again over the land, though.  We have to get under this bridge to reach Ribadeo beyond – it always looks as if we’re not going to make it, but we do – just! We anchored the first night just off the timber wharf – the huge tree trunks look like matchsticks!  We were OK for one night, but it’s rather shallow.   Ribadeo is a pretty Ria, but has many shifting sandbanks which mean you can’t go further up it.   This is a view of Castropol on the other side of the Ria.  Suddenly in the middle of the evening, there was a long procession of trucks through Castropol, all honking their horns.  We thought it was some kind of protest, but found out later it was to celebrate the fiesta day for the Patron Saint of Truck Drivers! The next day we moved into the marina and the weather perked up. A nice pedestrianised...