Ria Muros – safely passed costa muertes and the “end of the world”

After Gijon we have checked out a number of Rias mixing marinas with lovely anchorages. 
First stop after Gijon (or Xixon in Galician spelling) was Ribadeo, a small town, with zero touristic features – which we enjoy. After a night sleep we went a further day sail to Ria Viveiro. Larger town with perfect opportunities for bunkering essentials; food, wine, diesel. We knew wine was extremely affordable (cf Swedish prices about 50 % less costly) but even more nice was the low cost for fish, seafood and meat. As an example, blue finned, fresh Tuna 7 € / kg. Enough about prices, we truly enjoyed Viveira. Here we also where joined by family members for a weeks sail further west and south.  Next stop was La Coruna, a common harbour for north european sailors coming from Ireland, England and France. This 55m trip became rather interesting. After about 3 hours motoring against wind and swell we lost steering.  After some dramatic minutes I found out that the rudder tiller extension had loosened so no connection to either autopilot or steering wheel. Impossible to fix in about 2.5m swell, about 10 m/s following winds unless someone wanted to risk getting their arms broken. Emergency tiller mounted – voila we can steer the boat. Bad news: we had 35nm to La Coruna and to steer was extremely hard, i.e. 1.2 m tiller with a 24 tons boat and the swell. After 5 hours and taking turns with some creative way to use the winches to offload most of the force we were able to moor at the Coruna Marina. We have lost steering, propeller etc before but this time it felt a bit more serious – so we were very please having managed this incident without any damage to crew or boat. 

On our ever growing to do list is to have on more tiller extension made, increasing redundancy by separating autopilot from ordinary steering.

After a couple of days in La Coruna, where we met surprisingly many Swedish sailors, we are now in lovely Portosin, a marina in Ria Muros. Before Portosin we stayed in Ria Corme and Ria Camarinas after rather windy day sailing trips. Here we will wait for some wind generator spare parts.

To explain the headline – The coast between La Coruna and Cap Finisterre is called costa muertas (Coast of Death), I guess due to the very exposed atlantic coast. Finisterre means (I think!) end of the world – a name, given way before GPS and some brave guys claiming the earth was a sphere.  

For our dolphin lovers – yet another National Geographics quality clip is available here.