Buenos noches Spain & \240Donostia San Sebastián.

Verano Azul with us 2 onboard have arrived in what is the smallest marina of our trip so far but perfectly placed for the old town here.

A long 11 hour trip today with little remarkable to note other than we did see how dangerous leaving the Arcachon basin can be even when you time it to perfection - \240it was a bit frisky. The mist giving really poor visibility also didn’t help but the sun finally shone after 3 hours at sea. I saw 1 dolphin and we were attacked by flies in the middle of the sea - very odd. We avoided being shot at by the French military in the dangerous shooting zone south of Arcachon. \240Andrew got doused with diesel when we fuelled up just before departure so he had to shower & change. Otherwise all was good & we are relieved to be here floating in the marina with this beautiful city around us and to have made it to our next country.

More soon ......

A screenshot from our AIS system showing the route today. \240The wiggles were to do with avoiding being hit by missiles! \240I had to speak to the French military to get exact coordinates of where they were shooting today as an advisory said no one was allowed to go south from Arcachon! \240

Wow what a fabulous city this is. A perfect place to welcome our friends Steve & Liz on board for a few days.

Donostia (the Basque name) has a lovely old town area of narrow streets and lots of pintxos restaurants & bars, huge Spanish buildings and squares. It is flanked by 2 mountains on each side of the bay with 2 beautiful soft sand beaches aligning the front of the bay (which have been heaving due to the lovely warm weather). We have walked miles enjoying the scenery and vibrancy of this wonderful place that I can’t recommend more highly, it’s a must visit. The basque language is a bit testing but everyone seems to speak Spanish, French and many speak English too.

Our berth in the very small old walled harbour has been a great place to people watch and enjoy the daily spectacle of teenage boys hurling themselves off the wall into the harbour. The weather until today has also been hot (and very hot ) and sunny, yesterday a perfect 25 degrees but a bit too hot and humid the 2 days before. The sudden very hot weather caused a strange weather condition each night as \240the sun dropped a gale picked up and we were suddenly being tossed around in the berth, needing to add more lines and loads of fenders to protect VA from damage. It was a completely new experience and another lesson learned. The 2nd night we were more prepared for it. Each night the gale lasted a couple of hours and then just died down like it was never there.

Liz & Steve arrived on Thursday on the bus from Bilbao and are on board for our trip to Bilbao today. It is lovely to have guests on board and of course we have indulged in a bit too much alcohol & later nights \240so feeling a bit worse for wear this morning. The fresh sea breeze and mist should hopefully cure us. We have a 5 hour trip to get to our next marina in the estuary outside Bilbao. Steve & Liz are with us until Tuesday and then Jo & Sophie arrive for our next adventure.

Arrived here outside Bilbao yesterday pm with Steve & Liz on board. We stayed locally today but walked to and had a trip on this very rare transporter bridge, one of a very few left. An amazing piece of technology that is still in use here and allows the yachts to pass almost uninterrupted.

Can’t believe it’s July already, we are halfway through the year and we are into our 4th month at sea.

Today we took the metro into Bilbao from Getxo (pronounced Getjo) to visit the Guggenheim and to see the city. We have been before for half a day several years ago but only walked around the outside. Today we went in. To put a bit of context around our visit Andrew & I are not artistic and we certainly are not art officianados in any way but we thought we should go in & Steve & Liz also wanted to take a look. The building & architecture is stunning both inside & out as my photos show but frankly the art inside didn’t really impress. The only thing I liked were some sea scapes by Gerhard Ricter & a couple of Giorgio Morandi still life pictures of flowers 💐 the rest was all a bit up it’s own arse for us 😂. Still the building itself was worth it and we can say we have been in (although won’t go again). We lunched on pintxos again in the old town and came back to VA with another 15k steps under our belts. The weather here is warm but overcast now for a couple of days which is ok because the sun is returning later this week according to the forecast.

On our return to VA & mid siesta we had a visit from armed Spanish customs officers checking that we had not nicked the boat and were not smuggling loads of unwanted English people into Spain 🤣. Luckily we passed their checks and they didn’t find our smuggled guests on board.

We are here now until Wednesday. Steve & Liz fly back tomorrow and Jo & Sophie join us for the next few days and steps on our adventure.

We travelled from Bilbao to here today. We sadly said goodbye to Steve & Liz who flew home yesterday but hello to Jo & Sophie our new crew members and guests from Bilbao to Santander & onto Gijon on Friday.

Our last day in Bilbao was sunny & chilled with a long walk to Algorta old village & a nice chilled beer at the top of the hill. We then waved goodbye to S&L before enjoying a delicious home cooked paella on board.

Today’s trip here was eventless except that although lovely this marina is nowhere near anything!! A 5km not pretty walk around the run way of Santander airport got us to an out of town Carrefour 🙁 and so we got a taxi home.

A short but lovely stay in Santander with Jo & Sophie still on board.

We had a delicious crabby lunch & spent the rest of the pm lounging on the beach & I had my second sea swim. A little bit chillier than San Sebastián but very refrescos.

We left Santander marina early this morning (our 5th wedding anniversary) to do the long 90 nm trip here to Gijon (pronounced he hon) in Asturias. We had quite a bit of wind and choppy swell for much of our trip but it was mostly sunny & we did see a few dophins (yippee) leaping & playing in our wake. We have a fab berth here in Gijon for the next 4nights \240and will tell you more as we explore. For now some photos from the last couple of days.

We are in Asturias now having already visited Basque & Cantábria regions.

We are loving Gijon (where we are now until tomorrow). It is, a nicely placed Marina in a lovely old town with some good shops but there isn’t too much to see here. We spent Saturday doing cleaning and sorting out stuff on the boat plus a big supermarket shop. Jo & Sophie left us late on Friday night to get their bus to Porto. Sad to see them go and \240it has been \240lovely having some guests on board over the previous 9 days but not good for our livers 😱.

Yesterday we did one of our little bus trips, this time to the beautiful city of Oviedo just 30 mins inland.. A mostly overcast day so great for sight seeing. Another gorgeous Spanish town with lots of history. In our first square we came across some local Asturian musicians & dancers all dressed up in old Asturian costume & playing bagpipes (they have Celtic origins) so that was an interesting diversion. I did do some video but sadly this is blog software not vlog! \240We just cocked up on lunch a bit choosing a touristy place over something more local & the food therefore was very disappointing although we did try Fabada Asturiana the local bean stew which was ok. Next time we will be more discerning and eat local. It was definitely worth the trip though and we can recommend both Gijon & Oviedo to anyone visiting this part of Spain.

We are off again tomorrow, heading to Ribadeo in Galicia and towards our goal of turning the corner to the west coast of Spain.

A very pleasant trip from Gijon to Ribadeo today. It was a little chilly and a bit rock & roll at the start but it calmed a little & now we are here it is warm & sunny.

We passed the 1000nm mark on our trip so far from Cherbourg - wow 😮 it feels we have travelled a long way. We are now in Galicia.

Adios Ribadeo, Buenas Dias Cedeira and our first night at anchor ever. This should be interesting.

Ribadeo was a lovely stop for the last 2 days. A pretty town & coast line for our walk - see photos below and the people at the marina were very friendly & fuel the cheapest we have found since Guernsey so we filled up on the shortest fuel pontoon ever!!

Cedeira where we are now is a lovely sheltered ria/estuary around the corner of Northern Spain a bit and not too far from A Coruna where we are headed tomorrow. Sea & wind conditions are perfect and this is renowned as a good anchorage so it’s a good opportunity to test out what will be our preferred mode of stopover when we get to the med.

Today we passed the most northerly point of Spain which I didn’t realise is actually on a line with Bordeaux and much further north than San Sebastián. We are not yet however at our most westerly point, that will come when we are in Portugal.

The journey here was perfect, lovely flat seas, light winds and just a bit chilly and misty this morning when we left. The scenery we passed has been absolutely stunning with majestic green cliffs and rocky outcrops pretty much all the way. I imagine a bit like sailing along the Scottish west coast with the advantage of being warm:). We also saw dophins several times which always makes me 😃.

Part 6 - A Coruña to Portugal