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Day 16

España

La Rochelle to Laredo - Day Two

The wind finally gave up just past midnight. By now the motor and autopilot had been on for a while. The sails were just flapping now, as we rolled along through the waves so we furled them up. 
 
We still hadn’t seen a single boat or ship for over 12 hours now. Almost a bit freaky. The moon is still out and lighting up our own private bit of the world. It’s great but it does dim the stars and planets. We can still make out the small clouds by its light. I was hopeful to catch the setting of the moon before the sun comes up.
 
We spotted another boat, well lights, about 3am. Almost disappointing. With the boat on autopilot, a lone light a long way away to our left, 70 miles to the north coast of Spain and a sea depth of about 3000m (we were no longer over the continental shelf), there wasn’t much to do. So the hours are spent in a daze, checking for lights sporadically, listening for sails flapping and dozing off. I set my alarm for every 30 minutes, and I think I managed a few hours during the night. Marco would be up checking a few things every now and again. 
I was keeping an eye on the moon as it arced across the bow of the boats. It was nearing the horizon so I waited up to try to capture it. Photographically it is problematic. The camera will always try and get a balanced exposure across the frame (writing this I’ve just remembered I could have controlled  that better!) so it will overexpose the image. The iso will be sky high and so very grainy , polluted images remain. however the Sony a7 does capture what light is there as we can see.
 

So the moon set and this is the picture. It’s better in real life. I don’t think I had ever seen it set so clearly, so I wanted a record of it as close to how I remember it as possible.

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After the moon set, the stars came out so brightly, the boat has a big canopy which blocks you view a little so I went up the side of the boat to get a better view for a few minutes. sadly the camera doesn’t cope with that tiny amount of light , relatively speaking, .
 
A few more hours till dawn, so another nap before the dawn.
 
Dawn came, and I took more photos! There was no wind at all and the sea was glassy and smooth. 
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We were now in Spanish waters, so Marco changed over the flags. We had a straight run into the port. We were still the only boat out on the water.

The coast suddenly appeared in the dawn light. The mountains got bigger and bigger,

As we approached we got the boat ready for docking. We tried to raise the marina to get instructions, but to no avail. As we went in we saw that the fuel pontoon was on the way in and so we though we would berth there and fill up first and then work out where to berth.

This was my first time tying the boat on, just me. I was all ready, ropes coiled and in the right positions. Marco skilfully manoeuvred it alongside and I jumped off to get the back rope on. As  I got it on the cleat I didn’t wrap it quick enough and the wind blew the boat , I got it on a bit, ran to get the bow line and get that on, then the stern line came off…… oh well we got it on eventually, mainly with the help of the very chatty fuel man. 

As you can see from the photo there was plenty of space. So the fuel man helped us unmoor from the fuel pontoon and we tied up on a nice spacious pontoon. I did little better this time.

I was starting my quarantine now so not going ashore, so the rest of the day was spent chilling out, writing some blog and tidying the boat up a bit. Marco’s main role was then to work out where to next!

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