Dolphins Under My Bed

by Sandra Clayton

  There is a radio playing in the restaurant kitchen which you only hear when the door opens briefly to let the waitress in and out. It’s interesting how you can not be listening to a broadcast that is incomprehensible to you anyway, but are immediately alert to the inclusion of any words from your own language. I recognize the words ‘Ralph Feinnes’ and ‘The New Avengers’ before the door closes but even that is almost overwhelmed by the rock concert half a mile down the hill. Dessert is almond tart. When it comes it is stabbed with a fork and has Jerez sherry poured into the holes.

  Back out on the streets the atmosphere everywhere is extraordinarily good-humoured. There are no gangs, no drunks, no fights, no pushing, no shouting. A small, elderly man hunches on a narrow pavement with a sign in Spanish and English saying he is an outof-work English seaman. Two Guardia Civil officers wait patiently until a large African street vendor completes his sale of a leather belt from a well-stocked suitcase before moving him on. A couple of sly 20-somethings pose in a doorway with a neatly written sign claiming dire poverty. They are well-dressed and with such obviously feigned expressions of suffering that they fool nobody. A saxophonist plays a particularly plangent version of the Django Reinhardt classic, Nuage, while from a distance comes the ubiquitous sound of bagpipes.

  Late evening, and back on the quay beside our boat, the rock concert’s decibel level has soared above the pain threshold. Dominating the stage, a pink latex pig in a green shift sings aggressively into a microphone to the immense delight of a large number of small children. Then the heavy metal returns and children and parents melt away. Today’s music is as incomprehensible to me as ’60s music was to my parents. The only difference being that, courtesy of technological advances, nowadays it is much louder. It is currently bouncing off the buildings and making all the masts and rigging in the yacht basin rattle. There is no point in trying to sleep, so we continue walking.

  Tied up to the quay, a 70ft schooner is putting on a pirate play. A pirate play is easy to follow in any language: lots of shouting, macho posturing, leaping through the rigging and waving swords about. After a while we join a throng of amiable strollers that takes us back onto the main road again and into the fair. Neither of us has been to a fair in decades. The years fall away. It is fragrant with candy floss and diesel fuel, bristling with shooting galleries – darts, air guns, bows and arrows, corks aimed at miniature bottles – and brimming over with food.

  The exterior of the Ghost Train looks particularly ghoulish with its painted corpses rising from broken tombs. In its ticket booth a young woman, dressed as a zombie, is watching the sit-com One Foot in the Grave on a tiny portable TV.

  As soon as the concert finishes we go to bed, although the fair is still going and the pirate play has yet to reach its climax. We assume that the loud bangs we can hear is the pirates firing the small canon on their stern, but when we stick our heads out of the hatch above our bed we see that it is their stupendous firework display, so fast and furious that it sends their remaining patrons reeling back against the sea wall. It is so good, in fact, that when it finishes a huge cheer goes up from all around the quay and the fairground.

  After breakfast on Sunday morning we top up our water tanks, and then walk round to the other marina to make arrangements for the week we shall be away. We have decided to leave Voyager on a mooring buoy there as it will be a fraction of the cost of our present berth. There will be a buoy available late afternoon. With that settled we set off on a long, slow walk around the deserted headland to the Torre de Hercules, the world’s oldest working lighthouse that we passed as we sailed into the harbour.

  It is one thing to wander among Roman ruins and imagine what the buildings must have looked like. It is quite another to look up at this great stone tower, whose light has been trimmed through two millennia; to think of the generations who have laboured up its steps, and the lives its light has saved from the surrounding sea. For Galicia’s northern coast has witnessed countless shipwrecks. Its storms and jagged rocks have earned it the name Costa da Morte, coast of the dead, and overlooking La Coruña is a cemetery for drowned sailors.

  From the lighthouse we take a short-cut through the dunes and scrub to get back onto the road. Families are picnicking under brightly-coloured umbrellas. On the steep coast road back to the quay we stop at a small café. It has half a dozen tables single-file along the narrow pavement. None of them is occupied. We choose the one where the conjunction of umbrellas gives the most complete shade. The proprietor comes out to us.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ I ask in Spanish.

  His right hand shoots up to his left shoulder and then slashes downwards past his right hip. ‘No!’ he says emphatically. ‘Dos cerveza,’ I say, ‘Por favor.’ Our drinks arrive. We say thank you in Spanish. The man moves a short distance away, hovers, then disappears into his café.

  He emerges a few minutes later with a tiny girl in a pink embroidered dress and a tiny denim baseball cap worn back to front. Her fair hair and skin and delicate features give her the look of a porcelain doll. In hesitant, economical English he introduces us to his 16-month old daughter.

  There is a noise behind the man as he is joined by a robust dark-haired boy in a pedal car. The little boy’s face is a picture of pleasure as his plump brown knees pump vigorously at the pedals. The man introduces his three-year old son to us. And as we slowly drink our beer, this man with no English tells us in English the best place to watch the fiesta’s main firework display tomorrow, and the route of the pageant that will carpet the street with flowers; and talks of family life and parenthood and the surprising differences between raising a boy and a girl.

  The door behind our chairs, he says, is the entrance to their grandmother’s house. His son loves to visit his grandmother. ‘But the girl. . .’ He throws out a despairing hand. And the words tumble out. ‘Two children: good. But no more! And the difference! The boy, he sleeps all night.’ His daughter? ‘Arghhh! Awake at 2.30am!’

  ‘Wait ‘til she’s sixteen,’ we say.

  ‘Arghhh!’ he says again, looking at her with a combination of bewilderment and adoration. ‘Always on the move!’

  As if on cue, the tiny dynamo sets off for pastures new, trailing father and brother behind her. We finish our beers and contemplate youth and age; life and death and how quickly time passes. For in our two families, we are the older generation now.

  Late afternoon we motor Voyager back round the little 18th century fort to the marina we started at and tie her to a plastic mooring buoy. An attendant comes out in a dinghy and insists we move her to a large metal drum instead.

  A narrow strip of gold behind the Ferris wheel is all the sunset we get this evening. But by 9.30 the sea and the heavily-clouded sky become deepest pink with a strip of gold at the horizon. It is most beautiful.

  Monday morning is grey, bleak, windy and overcast. Outside the Hotel Atlantico we board a neat little bus with red curtains for Santiago Airport and begin our journey home.

  19

  Return to La Coruña

  We return to La Coruña at the beginning of September. The harbour is hectic and we want to be quiet. The weather is too rough to attempt the passage round Finisterre for the time being, so the answer is to go and anchor in one of the adjacent rías until it improves.

  When we’d got back to Voyager, however, we’d found that a piece had been chipped out of her port bow by the metal mooring buoy and the refrigerator would not ignite on gas. So before we can go anywhere we need to repair the gash in the gelcoat and get the refrigerator fixed. We also need to replenish our food supplies and there is still the laundry waiting to be done.

  It is a long, long walk, culminating in a steep hill, to the premises of the authorized Electrolux refrigerator repairer listed in our owner’s manual. We arrive at his metal shutters promptly at 9am. A sign on them says they open at 9.30. We find a street café and order coffee. The man behind the counter has a bad case of the shakes so we wait there while the coffee reac
hes the cups and then carry them outside ourselves so that there will still be something left to drink.

  When the repair shop’s shutters finally roll up we learn from the men inside that they are no longer Electrolux agents. If we want our fridge repaired we will have to wait a few days for them to come out to look at it. Then it would take three or four days to get parts from Madrid, and then they would have to see about coming out to fix it. They don’t seem keen, and we have begun to mentally add up the time this is going take, not to mention its potential cost.

  We say we’ll think about it and go off to check out the launderette before lugging our washing all the way up here again. Now that its steel shutters are up it is apparent that this is not a self-service launderette after all but a drycleaners and service laundry. This means it could take three or four days to get our laundry back. We set off for the supermarket.

  When you travel in the way we do, you become a connoisseur of supermarkets. Each has an ambience of its own. As soon as you enter it you know whether it is run for the customers’ convenience or the owner’s. The floor plan dictates whether you are a contented shopper or an irritable one. Wide aisles plus a ticket dispenser at the wet fish, cheese and bread counters make all the difference between leaving cheerfully or with gritted teeth. Add friendly staff, and it goes into a sort of private pantheon of cherished supermarkets. La Coruña’s is one of these.

  It is on the ground floor of a large square market building, up a steep hill and a long way from the harbour. In Spain, we discover, supermarkets are invariably a long way from the quay and up a steep hill. At its self-service fruit and vegetable counter we reach for a bag and begin making our selection. We are the only people there apart from a mature lady replacing empty crates with full ones. After a minute’s uncertainty she comes over to us, coughs discreetly then politely, wordlessly, indicates a small dispenser we hadn’t noticed. It contains disposable plastic gloves: a simple but civilized means of ensuring that when you’ve selected your apples, subsequent customers don’t go home with your finger prints all over theirs.

  It has been a disappointment to us that only relatively large towns seem to sell fish. Whenever I grumble about it people point out that the sea is full of them and there are fishermen everywhere – which is true – but there is rarely a fisherman around with a couple of fresh trout handy when you want them, and David and I don’t fish. I know this is moral hypocrisy, as we will buy them lifeless off a slab, but hauling one up by a hook in its throat and observing the fatalism in its eyes as you kill it is beyond us.

  La Coruña’s supermarket has a wet fish counter. I order two trout from the tall young man standing behind it. He tries to converse, sociably, but my Spanish is too limited so he concentrates on the fish. After opening the first one he inspects it with a pained expression, shakes his head, lifts it by its tail and drops it at arm’s length into a waste bin. The second trout soon follows. With the sweep of an eloquent hand across a tray of local sardines, and a brush of the fingertips past his lips, he invites me to consider an alternative whose internal hygiene he can personally guarantee is beyond reproach. Then, with a plastic bag on each hand, he selects a dozen of them individually and guts every tiny one. ‘With garlic,’ he says, ‘onion, tomato, potato.’ He raises his fingers to pursed lips again in a way that says delicious.

  They are. And as we lunch on them back at the boat we have a crew meeting. The damage to the port bow can only be reached by either drying Voyager out somewhere and standing on a ladder, or going into a marina and dangling off the pontoon. Our fridge is powered in three ways: by gas when we are at anchor; by 12-volt electricity when one of the boat’s engines is running; or by mains electricity via a shore line. The meeting concludes with the following decisions: the hull can wait; we can still chill the fridge when we’re travelling and won’t store perishable goods when we’re not; the larder is now full; and as for the laundry, we still have a few items we haven’t used yet.

  THE RÍAS OF NORTH-WEST SPAIN

  20

  La Coruña to Ares

  We leave La Coruña after lunch and head for the anchorage at Fontan. One of the unexpected pleasures of this part of our journey is the undeveloped rías. They are long narrow inlets in the coastline, former valleys that have become submerged by the sea and peculiar to this part of Spain’s north-west Atlantic coast. La Coruña is a ría, but it has developed into a large town and a busy commercial harbour. Most have remained relatively undeveloped.

  This region is very attractive anyway, with a rugged, hilly coast and trees coming down to the water line, but there is an added pleasure when you enter one of these quiet rías. They are all quite different. One will have a long, deserted, sandy beach with a path leading up a hill through woodland to a hamlet. Another will have a fishing village around a small harbour. Yet another will have a small rural town at the end of it, but all of them have one thing in common: they are largely unspoilt. Nor do they have the intense summer heat that southern Spain can produce.

  Intense or not, one of the essentials of a life afloat is shade from the sun. And if you don’t create some shade in your cockpit one of two things will happen: either you fry out in the open, or you spend all your time cowering below in the only available shade. We knew our fair English skins wouldn’t cope with too much direct sunshine and, alert to the risks of skin cancer, we’d spent quite a bit of time designing and making awnings for the boat before leaving England. The one going over the boom and providing maximum cover, headroom and airiness we had already put to good use. A smaller one, to be slung under the boom, had been designed to allow unrestricted movement of the mainsail. The journey to Fontan is the first time we have wanted to use the mainsail at the same time as needing shade, and the small awning works very well.

  Unfortunately, when we arrive at Fontan the anchorage is littered with buoys. Worse still, there is a large fishing fleet. Fishermen are a cruiser’s natural enemy. They plant lobster pots and discard netting where they are most likely to wrap themselves around your propellers, and the sea is their workplace so they have a tendency to resent leisure sailors. One way of demonstrating this is to roar past anchored yachts at full throttle in the chill early hours, comforted in the knowledge that their massive wake will have thrown a yachtsman or two out of his warm bunk and turned more than one galley or saloon into a disaster area. So, if you’re looking for a quiet night, as we are, an extensive fishing fleet is something to avoid.

  David consults the chart and cruising guide and decides to try the next ría along the coast, which is Ares. As we approach Ares I sit on the side deck with binoculars while David steers towards the centre of the long strip of sand described in the cruising guide. I squint hard at it and then say, ‘You’re heading for a breakwater.’

  Like a man with his hand on the Bible affirming his faith, he says, ‘There is no breakwater. I’ve got the cruising guide in front of me.’

  ‘Well, I’ve got the binoculars in front of me,’ I say, ‘and you’re heading for the centre of a sand-coloured stone wall.’

  David has a touching faith in cruising guides. Me, I trust what I can see, even obscurely through salt-smeared lenses.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he concedes with hauteur some minutes later. ‘It must be new.’

  There are no fishing boats visible, which means either there are none or, more likely, they are small ones that go out and return during daylight. The only sound coming from the village is a rather mournful church bell. The trees above the beach are tall and lush, and overlooking the bay is a mature hacienda-style house with carved stone balustrades and decorated eaves.

  We have dinner on deck in a lovely quiet evening that is overcast but warm. Beyond the new breakwater, men are now fishing out of dinghies, two to a boat, in stark relief against a flat grey sea and a misty grey sky. During the evening they return to the village, their small, wooden dinghies painted inside and out in red, blue and green, some with classic high prows, some pram-shaped with flat bows. A man
hauls one of the latter out of the water on a handcart, helped and hindered by children who chatter and laugh, admire his catch and get under his feet.

  Some of the smallest boats have integral wheels and are pushed up the ramp like wheelbarrows. The fishing fleet proper, when it returns shortly after, turns out to be mostly small, one-man vessels, trim and freshly-painted, lobster pots stacked 2 or 3 high in tidy rows around the rails and half-way up the wheelhouse. They return at modest speed. More to the point they are back before dark. We have high hopes of a quiet night.

  We don’t get one. The wind gets up. It sends the sea banging under our bridge deck and sucking noisily through the drain holes under the companionway grid. And having dutifully put our black plastic ball up in the rigging to signal that we are anchored, it collides remorselessly with a steel shroud with a clang even more mournful than the village’s church bell. The day, when it arrives, is grey, cloudy and damp and it rains a little. We stay in bed late, propped up with books and mugs of tea and remember when we used to get up at dawn on days like this to sit in a traffic jam.

  Although the alarm clock is still set to go off before dawn, for the shipping forecast on BBC Radio 4 Long Wave, it doesn’t mean much now that we are in the meteorological area of Finisterre where forecasts for this area are notoriously unreliable. Nor do they come without effort. We can only get Long Wave here by teetering on tip-toe on the edge of our sloping cabin roof, with body and arms at full stretch, while holding the portable radio’s fully extended aerial as far up Voyager’s steel backstay as we can get it. Reception of Short Wave is more accessible, so for news and programmes we use BBC World Service.

  We lunch on board and, when the weather brightens, take the dinghy ashore. While the few modern houses out on the headland are large and spacious, those in the village seem to be almost in miniature, with green shutters, tiny balconies and chaotic terracotta roofs. It is 4.30 when we arrive and everywhere is still closed except for a small café. After a stroll we have coffee there, overlooking the harbour. It is a lovely, peaceful bay. Before we return to the dinghy, we pace out the new breakwater, so that we can let the Cruising Association have the details for the next edition of its cruising guide.