We leave on Tuesday, July 13 at 8 am, after a last “app”-greeting out of Camaret-sur-Mer (near Brest) to our family. We will be out of range for a few days. There is wind force 5, so the 1st reef has been set and with the jib instead of the genoa we leave. There are also high waves, already predicted by Stuut (volleyball friend), resulting in a 1st puke session of the undersigned. Afterwards relief and otherwise ok. It’s still rough, but it’s going fast. This is how the 1st day progresses, at the end of the afternoon we get Idéfix, a solo sailor, over the VHF radio. Apparently a bit lonely, because we have the idea that he has changed his course a bit to be visible not only via AIS, but also live. Hop and there he goes again. Still some fishing boats fishing, but otherwise quiet. This is how we enter the 1st night. We get through the night with the Action’s kitchen timer, which we set every 20 minutes to glance around and check the AIS for other ships in the area, check course and keep an eye on the weather.
The next morning, after some naps, we are again fresh and fruity in an unfortunately again cloudy quatorze juillet. The 1st 147 nautical miles are done at 10 o’clock, of roughly 350 to go. The morning ripples by at a leisurely pace. Another freighter and sailboat on the horizon; nothing else. At 3.34 pm we have covered 173 and are exactly halfway there. In the meantime we have set the gennaker and we are getting some more speed (around 5 ½ knots). Another 27 miles to the Spanish border! At 10 pm we can hoist our Spanish guest flag and go into the 2nd night. The guest flags are a kind of code of conduct: on the starboard side (to the right of the boat) you hang a flag of the country where you are a guest (national courtesy flag).
We’re almost getting used to cooking, eating, making tea, grabbing a snack and sleeping while sailing. Always 1 hand for yourself and 1 hand for the boat, as we were told at our farewell drink, because you are always being swung back and forth. Because the wind has changed in strength in recent days, we are always recalculating when we will arrive in A Coruña. If this will be in the night and when we see the wind rising to the predicted wind force 6 off the coast, we decide to make a “stopover” about 30 miles before Coruña to leave the rough sea off the coast into a very quiet bay at Cedeira to spend the night at anchor. We arrive just before sunset and sail to A Coruña the next afternoon. We’ve done it!!
