29th September to 2nd October 2017
The bay offers a very sheltered anchorage with an equally weird entrance – I highly recommend you follow the leading-line if there is any swell from the West. We had a 3m or so swell from the West, which was breaking (spectacularly, if periodically) on some submerged rocks which a straight-line entrance from the North would have been very close to. We followed the line drawn on the charts for entering the bay, and the 3m swell from behind us slowly petered out as we followed it’s straight course, leaving us in the bay in a flat calm despite the apparent absence of any shelter from the swell. We went round the corner towards Camarinas, and then chose to anchor closer to the beaches than the town, as we didn’t need to stock up on anything heavy or awkward and it’s only a short dinghy ride across the bay in any case – the anchor set immediately and we were secure and sheltered from most wind directions.
A few hours after we arrived, just as dinner was ready, a German couple popped over in their dinghy with their kid – they had arrived a little while after us, and recognised the boat from the marina in La Coruna. As they remembered our eldest looked a similar age to their son, they rowed over to say hello and see if our kids would like to play together. Lawrence (their son) said nothing. Arthur shouted random phrases from Octonauts (while nude, as he tends to be). We took this as consenting to playing on the beach together the next day.
The next day, morning consisted of doing some washing, cleaning and then shopping. In the afternoon we went over to the beach to have lunch and then generally chill with Marco, Sofia and Lawrence, and arranged a barbeque for when the weather brightened up the next day. By then some other cruisers, aboard Moonlighting, who we had met in La Coruña had also dropped anchor on the same side of the bay as us, and Sofia had paddleboarded over to invite them and their three kids as well. I ran into Will (of Moonlighting) looking for a shop to buy something BBQ appropriate, on a Sunday in a smallish Spanish town. Needless to say we both returned to our boats with nothing in-hand, and what would have been a barbeque turned into Sofia and Marco’s meat stores and home-milled dough for flatbreads, along with cous-cous, salad, chorizo potatoes and some other sundries from the rest of us. With six kids it wasn’t a dull afternoon, I think it is safe to say that everyone enjoyed themselves, and we all swapped contact details before we left, as we were each bound for somewhere around Muros and then Ria Arousa over the coming weeks.
