Royal Air Force Yacht Club

A Postcard from Ione

 

We are now sitting out our first really rainy day in Vilagarcía in the Ría de Arosa, so it seems a good time to send a ‘communal postcard’.

 We left UK just before midnight on Friday 14 May, with John Oates as crew, to catch the tide out of the Needles and head across channel. With three of us on board, watchkeeping was relaxed, doing only three hours on and six off through the night.

 

 

The channel crossing was pretty uneventful apart from one strange quirk with the chart plotter just off Alderney when it suddenly showed us as heading south towards the Casquets at 16 knots. Ione had apparently turned into an out-of-control speedboat! A cross check with the handheld GPS showed the plotter position to be significantly awry and this was only cured by re-initialising the system. It just shows that one should not rely totally on modern electronics. For the first 15 hours there was little wind, but then we did get a decent sail through the afternoon and second night, getting in to Camaret around noon.

 

 

We spent three nights in Camaret, having an extremely social time. First we were joined by John and Cilla Mitchell on Chantrel, also RAFYC, and also on their way to Spain, then the following day Tim and Sarah Phillips arrived in Caribou on their way back from La Rochelle.

 Camaret Seafront

 

With the GRIBs showing near gale easterlies on the Spanish coast we decided to delay our departure to Spain and instead went through the Raz and east to the Iles Glénans. Even mid-May and mid-week there were a couple of dozen boats on the moorings, but the place still looked delightful with an abundance of wild flowers. Thence on to the marina in Concarneau where we walked around the old town and re-stocked with food and water.

Iles Glénans

 

 

We set off for Spain at noon on Saturday 22^nd in bright sunshine, but again with little wind and had to motor until midnight when the wind came in from the forecast ENE allowing us a good sail for the next 24 hours. Dawn on Monday on Sarah’s watch was superb – a beautiful sunrise and dozens of dolphins playing around the boat. The weather that day varied from light airs to a fresh breeze and from sunshine to a heavy thunderstorm, but we made A Coruña on Monday evening after a passage of 340 miles in 56 hours.

Maria Pita Square – A Coruña

 

John had to fly home on the following day, but we stayed on in the Dársena de la Marina in A Coruña for four nights. Again this was a sociable time. One night we squeezed a total of 16 people into Ione’s cockpit for drinks, coming from five other boats – French, Irish, German, Dutch and British! The next day Gwen and Glen (met here last year) came to lunch, followed by Chantrel arriving and the party expanding.

Ione and Chantrel in Dársena de la Marina

 

We left A Coruña on Friday 28^th, a fortnight after leaving home, to sail west along the Costa da Morte – a wild and rugged sweep of coastline - to the ría of Corme and Laxe. The passage inside the Islas Sisargas was dramatic with the swell breaking on the rocks on either side of the narrow channel. With the wind in the SW Laxe was the more sheltered of the two small towns so we spent a couple of nights anchored off it, exploring ashore and socialising with French friends on their yacht Virginia anchored near us.

 

 

We left Laxe on Sunday morning variously motoring and sailing the 30 or so miles to Camariñas. Here we stayed at a small and friendly marina attached to an equally friendly and welcoming yacht club that also boasted an excellent cheap restaurant. All that one could desire! The town itself is an amazing mixture: a few old traditional streets with houses of granite and overhanging balconies, a very modern stylish walkway around the seafront – built no doubt with EU grants, and some appallingly tacky developments of badly designed high-rise blocks. Socialising continued, most Camariñas Harbour memorably with Wild Bird, a Vancouver 38, which had just been bought in Lagos and was on her way to Scotland in two stages. Skipper Graham was 87, his two girl crew were both 75+ plus one younger man. Hope for us all yet!

 

On 1 June we set off south again, passing Cape Finisterre, which we plan to explore on our return, and into the Ría de Muros where we anchored for the night in the bay just inside the entrance – the Ensenada de San Francisco, which provided some shelter from the wind, though, as it turned out, not from the swell. After a night spent rolling, we motored the short distance around the headland to the town of Muros, anchoring off the town on a steeply shelving muddy bottom in 14 metres.

Cape Finisterre

 

Muros from the Church

Muros is an attractive old town with less modern development than many. The soportales – covered, pillared pavements – were used to shelter small boats in the days before the seafront had been developed. There is a striking Romanesque church with bell tower and cupola. We also took the dinghy across the harbour to visit the old tide mill, now disused but converted into an interesting Mill museum.

Friday was market day, so we were able to provision well at the various stalls. Throughout the town we saw several small groups of older women apparently cutting up flowers and evergreen twigs with scissors. On enquiry it turned out that Sunday was the festival of Corpus Christi and there were to be religious processions through the town with statues being carried through the streets, which would be strewn with petals and leaves.

 

Ione anchored in Muros

 

After a couple of nights in Muros we motored the five miles across to Portosín marina in company with Chantrel. Although a little way from the town, and so not ideal for provisioning, the marina is efficient and friendly. We were able to do the domestic chores - recharging our batteries, replenishing the water tanks and doing the laundry.

 

The 45-mile passage to Ría de Arosa gave us an excellent sail, initially reaching south offshore in the swell and then beating up into the ría with the sea dropping to a flat calm in the shelter of Isla Sálvora. The marina at Caramiñal managed to find space for both boats despite the arrival of a racing fleet of 60.

 

Escarabote Harbour    Corpus Christi salt & flower carpet

 

After a night in a marina, peace was needed so we headed up to the top of the inlet to anchor alone just off the little town of Escarabote and south of a wide sandy beach. The town has a mussel-canning factory and is home to a fleet of mussel boats which, being a Sunday, were all in harbour. Dinghying ashore we found that we had unfortunately missed the local Corpus Christi procession, but its route was clear from the paths of cut leaves and flowers, also marked out by rough salt dyed in many colours.

Escarabote

 

 

 

Next morning after breakfast the wind backed SW, slowly increasing, and so making the anchorage a lee shore. Hence after lunch we hauled up the hook and made our way across to the marina at Vilagarcía to meet up again with Chantrel. Progress was not direct as the ría is full of bateas – Ría de Arosa Mussel Bateas

these are anchored platforms some 10 metres square from which ropes of mussels hang down to feed and grow. The rías in Galicia reportedly produce some 60% of the world production of mussels and half of these come from this Ría de Arosa. We are now tucked up in Vilagarcía marina. Chantrel left this morning to head north, thus ending the RAFYC Rally Coruña.

 

The forecast for the next couple of days is for heavy rain, so we will stay here. Our plans for the next three weeks are not yet set in stone, but we will probably head next towards Vigo and Baiona before coming back to explore the Ría de Pontevedra. Vilagarcía is on the railway to Santiago and A Coruña, so we may come back here to leave Ione for 6 weeks when we return to UK at the end of this month.

 

Love & best wishes to all

Tony & Sarah

8^th June 2010