Goodbye Galicia!

After a month cruising the Galician Rias, these crystal-clear waters and sandy bottoms (for Saecwen´s anchor), were starting to feel like home.  The Rias Baixas are a series of four wide inlets that run in from the sea on the north west corner of Spain. Each Ria is peppered with sandy beaches on both northern and southern shores providing shelter from the Atlantic in pretty much any wind condition.  Whilst we did get caught out a couple of times with a quick shift in the wind, we could always hurriedly evacuate to the other side of the Ria and find shelter.

This unique ecosystem of inlets protected by islands and reefs creates the perfect playground for all kinds of aquatic activities and curiously each estuarine community appears to specialise in a different kind of water-sport. Aldán off the Ria de Pontevedra is renowned for its Olympic kayak champions and here we discovered a unique variant of kayaking with a very narrow craft that requires balancing on one knee and thrusting forward with a single paddle in a Polynesian kind of spirit.  

Kayak practice, Ría de Aldán

Liméns Bay in the Ria de Vigo, one of our favourite spots, was wind-foiling territory. Here we watched the beginners on large sturdy windsurfers through to the experts with skaters helmets on tiny boards that they pump to lift out of the water, powered with their inflated sails to get into speedy foil-mode. There were a few near misses with Saecwen anchored in the middle of the bay with these speedy craft.  Midweek children´s games time in Limens was either on the beach or in the water and seemed to create lots of screams and laughter from the shore on most days – THE perfect playground. In the evenings however all this activity would die down, leaving us peacefully swinging at our anchor to enjoy the gloriously long balmy evenings (mid summer sunset at 10.30pm).  Galicia is usually renowned for it’s closing fog, where it can start to feel a bit like Cornwall, with the rugged cliffs and similar species of gorse and wildlife, but we were lucky enough to have almost a full month of blue skies.

Ensenada de Liméns, Ría de Vigo

We also witnessed some more adventurous feats to and from the Cies Isles, a stunningly beautiful archipelago of islands protected within a national park.  Over 200 swimmers took part in a race from Illa de Faro (the northern isle of the Cies) to Vigo, a 20km swim in what are still quite chilly Atlantic waters.  Heading the other way from the mainland to the 5 km stretch to Cíes we also watched a couple of kayakers boldly cross from the mainland to Cies dodging en route the bow of a tanker entering the industrial port of Vigo.

Saecwen anchored in the Archipelago de Cíes

The water in the Rias is spectacularly clean – a far cry from what we have left behind in the UK. Many of the beaches are flanked by abundant kelp forests by the shores and there is also a healthy amount of seaweed growing on the hanging ropes of the floating wooden mussel farms known as viveros. The viveros also make for a great breakwater in each Ria protecting the beaches and coves from the Atlantic swell.    

We saw wrass and trigger fish on the isthmus at Cíes, swam with schools of sea bream and bass and caught two suppers’ worth of mackerel in the Ria de Muros. Another great indicator of the healthy Ria ecosystems is the presence of dolphins – who we usually see playing at the bow of Saecwen when out at sea - but here in the Rias they come close inshore. One evening a small pod of bottlenose dolphins came within about 30 metres of us in the kayaks in the bay of Palmeira in the Ría de Arousa.

Bottlenose dolphins in the Rias

It was certainly wonderful to see how both people and wildlife can thrive together when there is clean water – and it was sad to reflect how the water in many of the estuaries of south and south west England is so dirty and lifeless due to a constant onslaught of sewage and agricultural pollution (if you have a moment please sign the River Action/Greenpeace petition to prevent the spreading of toxic sewage sludge on agricultural land here) 

Ensenada de Barra, Ría de Vigo

All good things must come to an end. So after a month exploring this incredible Galician cruising ground it was time to continue our voyaging south. Saecwen had enjoyed over 20 different anchorages and ports in the bays of and islands of the Rias Baixas - many in which we found ourselves to be the only yacht. But a promising forecast weather window of fair northerly winds was too good to miss. So we sadly slipped our moorings in the fair town of Baiona to head back out into the Atlantic Ocean - accompanied (of course) by a leaping group of Galician dolphins.

Ilote de Guidoiro, Ria de Arousa