Today, I update this blog from onboard the back of our faithful Giramonda anchored at the foot of green mountains overlooking a long sweeping sandy beach. It’s calm and peaceful and a complete transformation from Muxia from where we left this morning a little impromptu, “right let’s go”.

The reliable thing about weather forecasts more than 12 hours out in this area is that they can be guaranteed to be wrong, it won’t rain: it rains, no wind: windy, sunny: overcast. At 8am after a late rise we saw an opportunity to finally get our big lassie out on the high seas again with moderate swell and wind against us, if we don’t go now we’ll probably be locked in for another three days until the next opportunity arises.

Muxia and Camarinas share a Ria bay on the north-western tip of Spain, a rural picturesque location with an active fishing fleet in Camarinas and an active festive community in Muxia. At first we anchored for a few nights near Camarinas, hoped ashore via ‘little G’ and picked up some much needed replacement cartridges for our Racor primary fuel filters, the only ones they had, and we took the lot, all four. We’d found the old cartridge full of sludge on port side after the recent rolly waves dislodged what must be dead diesel bugs in the bottom of the tank. Short story: all ok now.

We knew the winds would become wild, rising over 40 knots (46mph) for sustained times but we’d become comfortable and more confident in our ability to anchor securely with our oversized 55kg delta anchor. We tried to find a more sheltered anchorage ahead of these winds but ended up just as exposed and slept with an anchor alarm which fortunately didn’t sound until 8:30am. False alarms are common but a quick check confirmed we had indeed dragged and continued to drift, engines on, anchor up and against even stronger winds we redropped our anchor behind the harbour breakwater alongside the ‘marina’ (a couple of dilapidated pontoons) but leaving ample room for fishing boats to pass without us hindering their traffic.

The winds became more wild and the sea state whipped up with white foam and breaking seas from a short 400m fetch from the harbour wall. After our previous experience we should again have put more anchor down, but with anchor and bridle deployed we seemed to be hooked in well at high tide, so rode it out with two anchor alarms set overnight. No alarm, no dragging. We survived without drama and moved to Muxia marina the next day while winds calmed to get a few boat jobs done, get to the grocery store, and do some land-based exercise.

Muxia was sparse of boats, and turns out to be well maintained compared to Camarinas and the town was much more active with an annual weekend long festival ‘de Barca’ being set up with countless food trucks, fun fair, and live music. With grubby boat jobs done and fuel tanks and larder replenished we enjoyed a little time exploring the church like Sanctuary of Our Lady of la Barca (boat) overlooking the entrance to the bay. It was nice to climb the mount and get some steps in.

We began to make a few friends with yacht crew coming in to take shelter from the ever persistent southerly gales, like us, waiting for the weather to turn favourable for a venture south around the infamous Cap Finistere, not only known for it’s unforgiving death coast (Costa Morte) with hidden submerged rocks and gnarly cliffs, but also now home to fun loving rudder biting Orcas. General opinion was to wait until Monday, but this morning (Friday) we all saw an opportunity and the sparse marina became empty one by one including us.