I ran the Berlin Marathon, we crossed the Bay of Biscay to Spain and now we are in Portugal!

Olá dear readers, I am sorry I did not write my blogpost sooner, we were too busy enjoying our life the last weeks and I never found the time.

We have a new crewmember since sunday, our friend Moritz came from Berlin. I’m pretty sure he will catch a fish before Lukas, who still caught nothing but some seaweed and a bird. But more about that later.
About three weeks ago we left Mila all alone in the harbour in Brest and went to Berlin with the Flixbus, which only cost us about 60€ per person but was of course extremely uncomfortable. It took about 22 hours, with a little break in Paris.
We were happy to meet our families and friends and to have some drinks in our favourite bar, the Flop. On the 25th I ran my first marathon in 3:56. Five days went over really fast and then we headed back to Brest to continue our journey. It was a strange feeling to return to the harbour, like dropping into a completely different life again.
After we made sure everything on the boat was fine we drove to Camaret sur mer, just 11 nautical miles from Brest. We arrived in the dark and I was super tired from the travelling but Lukas convinced me that we should go to the Irish pub and eat a pizza and drink some pints. When we arrived there it was too late for pizza sadly, so we just had the beers and watched the barkeepers’ impressing games of darts.
Camaret is much more charming than Brest. We were especially fond of the ancient ships rusting away on the side of the harbour.

The next morning we got visited by some customs officers that were anchoring in front of the harbour. As they were a lot of officers coming to watch one guy filling out some forms Lukas didn’t invite them inside but let them sit outside in the rain. Fortunately they still found nothing to complain about. So we paid the harbour fee, got some water in our canisters and bunkered 150 liters of diesel for the crossing of the Bay of Biscay.
Due to our detour to Berlin we couldn’t cross it together with Tuuli and all the other boats with young crews that they met in Camaret, so we went on our own.
The leg started pleasant with about 10 knots and a crazy crowd of dolphins hunting for jumping fish around us in the first night.
The next night was less pleasant with about 35 knots in the peaks. We sailed through it with just the jib up and were racing along with up to 8,4 knots. I took this photo the next morning, when the waves already got smaller.

In the evening the wind died and we had to use the engine until the harbour. It took us 63 hours from Camaret sur Mer in France to A Coruña in Spain.

In A Coruña we had a great time partying with sailors from Norway, England, Sweden, Germany/US, Belgium, South Norway. One evening we tried to fit 12 people into a tapas bar.
For sobering out Lukas and I wanted to visit the Hercules tower, which is situated on a cliff north of the marina. The tower was already closed when we arrived there, but the view from the cliffs below the tower was amazing enough anyways.

We also got out our snorkeling gear and went for a dive with Sigurd and Tobias from the Landkrabbene. It was fun, although the water was too agitated to see anything.

When we had enough of A Coruña we left the harbour together with the sail boats Tuuli, Rosanna, Landkrabbene, Divina Remi and Danae. We were starting a bit later than the others because we had to get some diesel in the morning. I am proud to say that we still arrived in the bay of Camariñas first 🙂 Our colourful booster did a great job in the steady wind from the north, driving us forward really fast.

Oh, almost forgot the fishing story. Lukas came to wake me up for my shift and suddenly we heard the fishing rod making sounds outside. When we rushed out we discovered it was a big bird, we think a kind of grey gannet that bit on the rubber octopus Lukas was fishing with on the surface.
My stomach flipped over at the thought of Lukas having to pull out the feathers of that bird, spill blood everywhere and eat it, because when it’s dead anyway you should at least eat what you caught. I helped him to carefully pull the heavy bird onto the boat, trying not to break its neck. When it sat there in the net in the back of the boat it was alive and we saw that it spat out the lure already so we didn’t have to risk our fingers getting near its sharp bead. We got him back to the water as quickly as possible and were extremely releaved to see him fly away. Unfortunately there was no time to take a picture for the blog. After we were not shaking anymore Lukas started fishing again with a heavier lure, that was not staying on the surface. And … had bad luck again. The reel broke when he caught a giant bulk of seaweed. I have to confess that I was happy he wasn’t able to fish for some time then until he bought a new reel.

All the boats were anchoring next to each other in the bay in Camariñas and we had two nice campfire evenings with two guitars on the surrounding beaches.

I also paddled into the river with my paddleboard and found a beautiful little beach just for myself. See here:

Lukas came by with the dinghy and we went for an exploration up the river. It was really interesting to see the colour of the water changing from the shallow mouth towards the inland where it got a lot deeper. We could see a lot of fish under us in the clear water.

We pulled up the anchor on Saturday midday and had perfect sailing conditions until the Cape Fisterra, where the wind picked up a lot and we had to steer by hand as the windpilot started to steer a zigzag course which caused the boat to lean from one side to the other side in every wave which was slightly annoying.

In the evening the wind decreased a bit until it died completely. We had to use the engine and had some dolphins visiting us again in the dark. After a while a heavy fog appeared reducing the visability to about 30 meters. I started to sound the horn every two minutes making it impossible for Lukas to get any sleep. But as we still didn’t install our radar I was a little bit scared we might run into a boat without AIS. Luckily there were almost no ships around us except of some fishers. When we reached the harbour of Póvoa de Varzim in Portugal at 8 in the morning everything was still covered in fog and the harbour was filled with hundereds of mullets eating stuff on the surface of the water. We slept for a while and then visited the city centre to get some breakfast. We got breakfast and 4 pairs of shoes for 50€. And we also went to a Portuguese Lidl to restock our provisions. In the night Moritz arrived with the metro. The next day he had a walk in the city while Lukas tidyed up the boat and I went for my first run after the marathon.
Well, that was yesterday, in the afternoon we motored about 3 hours to Porto. When we arrived we were greeted by Emilie from a Norwegian Hallberg Rassy. Had some lovely cheese and port wine on a big new German boat without the Germans, but with an Irish guy and the Norwegian girls. When we moved to our boat we also conviced the Crew of the German boat Kobold to join us and in the end had about 11 people in the saloon heating up the air quite a bit 🙂
Was a really cool evening, thanks to everyone for making our first night in Porto awesome. We learned that it is really more communicative to park the boat with its butt to the pier, so that other sailors can see the home port, which is a great conversation opener.

Puh, I think I’m through now. As soon as Lukas is back from getting our outboard engine fixed we can finally go and explore the city.

Adiós for now, don’t let autumn get you down in Germany 😛
Well to be honest, sometimes temperatures are getting lower here as well, so it’s not the weather for t-shirts all the time anymore, actually I’m sitting in the cockpit at the moment with a blanket wrapped around me.