We said goodbye to our first onboard guest (Warren) on day 52. Just 1 more week until our second guest (Daisy) will also be departing.

It turns out writing blog posts with so many people onboard and also sailing most days is quite hard, hence a bit of delay in these posts 🙂

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Baiona (continuing south)

After spending a few weeks in the rivers of western Spain, we needed to continue heading south and into Portugal. We headed to Baiona to provide a good staging area for our next bigger sail. We would be mostly out of the Vigo river and set up ready to head to Portugal.

We tacked all the way out of the river, sneaking through the Islotes Las Estelas in order to get into Baiona earlier than planned. This was quite a busy anchorage, with probably 20 boats or more all anchored up. Once again we found ourselves in the same anchorage as Sailing Vessel Zoe!

The anchorage was alive with fishy activity.

Entering Portugal

Next stop, Portugal!

The next 26 or so miles took us out of Spain and into Portugal (just).

We aimed for Caminha, and a small anchorage on the river that holds the border between Spain and Portugal.

The wind was frustratingly light throughout the sail. But toward the end, we did manage to get onto a straight downwind run and tried out the Ghoster for the first time!

Due to the slow first half of the sail, we came into the river mouth an hour or so after high tide and there was about 3-5 knots of tide flowing out of the mouth.

This led to us motoring in at probably the highest RPM we have had the engine at, doing only 2 knots over land, but 7 knots through the water!

We anchored mostly out of the river flow near the beach on the Portuguese side. The maritime police soon showed up to check us into Portugal. They also advised that we move slightly, so once again up with the anchor to move a few 10s of meters.

We spent 2 nights in the Caminha anchorage, as it was rather lovely, protected, close to shore, and we wanted to break up our sailing.

On night 2 we tried out the boat BBQ for the first time and made some rather tasty burgers.