Hanging Out in Rias

4 September 2023 – Cedeira, Spain

For the past while, we have been hanging out in various rias (river mouths) along the north coast of Spain as we slowly make our way towards Cape Finisterre. We haven’t been doing much besides hanging out at beaches, enjoying the weather, and going on a few hikes, which is pretty ideal.

We spent a bunch of days at Ribadeo, which looked like a fairly large bay when we first arrived. There were three cute little towns on different sides of the bay, as well as a dock for big ships to load up on lumber. The bay must have been dredged to accommodate for the ships, so it was shallow everywhere except for directly off the lumber quay. This didn’t seem like it would be an issue, as Festina Lente was far enough away that she wasn’t that near the ships docked there, and they couldn’t have come any closer to us anyway because it was quite shallow. What we didn’t know was that there was a perigee (a.k.a. a super-moon), meaning that the moon was full and also at its closest point to the earth. When we first arrived in Ribadeo, the tides were only four feet, but due to the super-moon they quickly increased to fourteen feet in only a few days. We had to go closer to the big quay so as not to hit the bottom, which apparently violated the rules about how close you could get to the lumber yard and my dad had to talk the police into letting us stay one more day.

Besides all that, though, Ribadeo was a great place to be due to the three towns quite close to each other.

We went to get churros so much that the waiter at the café started laughing at us.

Another of the towns was perched on a hill and had many old buildings and narrow cobblestone streets.

Vivero is similar to Ribadeo except that the bay is much wider and it felt like Festina Lente had so much room to swing around in without getting into trouble with the police. We went to the beach and walked around town.

The next day, we went on a beautiful hike to a point overlooking the ocean. We first walked through what may have been a eucalyptus forest (it smelled amazing) to a rocky peak with a view of the sea. From that peak, there were steep stairs down it and out to the next one where the lookout was.

It took about the length of the hike to actually secure the dinghy, though, as unfortunately the only place to land it was on a beach exposed to the ocean swell and with breaking waves. Jonas managed to anchor it off the beach beyond the breaking waves and then pull it to some sharp rocks a little ways away where we got off. This worked well but it did mean that Jonas had to go swimming to reach the dinghy when we returned from the hike.

We are currently in Cedeira, which is actually the town where we first landed when we sailed from Ireland to Spain on our previous boat Blue Hour six years ago. It’s a lovely place so we’re glad to be back.

There’s a beautiful beach here as well – due to the super-moon it is sometimes only a metre wide and sometimes so big that it fills most of the harbour and would probably take half an hour to walk from the land to where it meets the sea.

Last night we went out for tapas at the same place we went to last time we were here. We also went on a beautiful walk through a forest.

Redes and Muxía

Spain

Festina Lente