Dolphins Under My Bed

by Sandra Clayton

  It is our first experience of lying at anchor in a gale but the anchor is well dug in and although the wind screams in the rigging and everything around us rattles and shakes we feel reasonably comfortable and secure. Not everyone is so fortunate. Late afternoon, when the worst of the wind has abated, two unhappy men from the village begin collecting fragments of one of the small wooden fishing boats. It had not been beached high enough above the rocks to escape these particularly violent, wind-driven waves. The latest shipping forecast, meanwhile, is favourable for travelling tomorrow.

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  Camariñas to Muros via Finisterre

  When we set off next morning it is still heavily overcast but our little bay is nowhere near as turbulent as yesterday. As we approach the exit from Camariñas itself and out to sea, however, it is a different story.

  There is a reef reaching out from the southern headland, and shallow water stretching some distance out from the northern headland. This affects the movement of the water passing between them and, despite only a light southerly wind, the exit is very rough, exacerbated by a swell created by yesterday’s huge tide. We bounce and crash, and mutter through rattling teeth that if the open sea turns out to be as bad as this we will come back into this ría until things get calmer.

  In the event, the Atlantic Ocean is much calmer than the entrance to the ría and it is quite a pleasant passage in bright sunshine. The forecast is WSW up to Force 7 although it never reaches more than 8 knots as we head down towards Finisterre, which is fortunate since the wind is actually from the south which means it is directly on the nose.

  The heavy sea swell persists, despite the light wind, although happily the rollers are behind us and send Voyager surfing at speed. There is also a lot of flotsam around us: broken wooden crates washed from the decks of boats and branches from tropical trees.

  This stretch of shoreline between Ría de Cameriñas and Finisterre is the most westerly point of Europe’s Atlantic coast. The name Finisterre – from the Latin finis terrae meaning end of the earth – was just what it seemed to be to the Roman expedition brought to a halt there by what they imagined to be an endless sea.

  Once we have rounded Finisterre the wind is no longer on our nose and we are able to put up the sails. It is a very pleasant sail; not at all what we had expected from Cape Finisterre. Had it not been for its notoriety we should barely have noticed it at all. In fact, it is so quiet and pleasant that there is no risk at all in taking the shorter inshore passage, between rocky shoals, to get to Muros.

  The Ría de Muros is a huge bay and it is a very hazy day. Initially there is some hesitation as to where the anchorage is, as it is some distance after entering the ría before you can see it. However, once we round Cabo Reburdino we can see the little town of Muros and quite a few yachts already anchored there.

  Muros is a super little billet. We anchor a few yards off the town quay, near a house whose garden juts out over the water, and well away from the fish dock and the fishing fleet. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life. Deserted bays are restful; town quays are fun. With the latter you can pop into town in your dinghy in the cool of early morning and then watch the passing throng from the shade of your cockpit in the heat of the day.

  Once anchored, we go ashore. Muros rises in tiers from the seafront and some of Galicia’s best traditional architecture is to be found in the narrow streets of its Old Town. The fact that it has all been built in stone also gives a special unity to its arches and columns, squat buildings, flights of steps, benches built into the walls of houses and water troughs for washing clothes. In a back street the market traders are putting up their stalls.

  We climb a steep hill. At the top is the cemetery. It is crowded with religious images and artificial flowers and overlooks the sparkling sea.

  We take the route back down via a very narrow, winding street of very small houses. A man is renovating one of them. He has the tiniest works van we have ever seen, with just enough room inside for his tools and a pane of window glass. But then, a tiny van is all anyone could possibly get up a street like this.

  The kindergarten, half way down, has big flowers cut out of paper in primary colours on its windows, and at the bottom a mature woman in a floral overall decorously sweeps up leaves. As time goes by we will come to realise that mature women with house brooms are responsible for much of the cleanliness of Spanish streets. Back on the quay we sip cold beer among some of the town’s ancestral arches while the cheerful bar owner gives us directions to the supermercado.

  We select masses of fruit and vegetables (remembering the little plastic glove) but on reaching the checkout are sent back round all the boxes again to find the number identifying each item so that we can key it into the electronic scales we had failed to notice the first time around, then weigh each bag and stick on the price ticket.

  We buy some steak and enjoy it hugely with onion, red pepper, garlic and mushrooms and a bottle of Faustino. Foolishly we start drinking the red wine while I am cooking, after the beer and on an empty stomach. This is a mistake. I wake next morning with my first migraine in a long time. Even David, most unusually, gets up with a hangover. We leave Muros for Bayona sometime after 10am.

  24

  Bayona

  We have been to Bayona once before and remember it, and a particular seafood restaurant, with enormous pleasure. I make a hot drink to have after weighing anchor, but the chain sticks and by the time we get to the drink it is tepid. The nine-hour passage to Bayona exacerbates the migraine.

  I haven’t always had migraine. It was a side effect of prescription medication I didn’t want to take in the first place for symptoms it failed to relieve anyway. Then I spent a year on other pills to get rid of the migraine. I don’t take any pills at all now, but once in a while I still get a migraine, usually connected with red wine drunk under the wrong conditions. It makes me even more cross knowing that it’s my own fault, than it did when it was somebody else’s.

  The first half of the journey is most unpleasant; rough enough for the foredeck to be awash. The sea is also full of flotsam again, this time with the wreckage of small boats and refuse blown off boatyard quays added to the stuff washed from the decks of ships and bits of trees. There is also a navigational warning on our Navtex.

  The Navtex system provides vessels with navigational and meteorological warnings and other urgent safety information. It is a component of the International Maritime Organisation and all member countries transmit their information in English. We have a small receiver above the chart table and the information appears on a screen. Among today’s warnings is one about six containers washed from a cargo ship and which may not be visible above the surface.

  When your life is spent on land, cargo lost overboard means little beyond another increase in the cost of living through bigger insurance premiums; or, to a very tiny minority, something useful washing up on their doorstep. To seafarers, however, an encounter with one of these containers can be catastrophic. The reason so many of them end up in the world’s oceans is the way in which they are transported. Since only cargo carried below deck attracts port levies and canal tolls, shipping companies stack containers on deck, as many as seven high or 60 feet.

  Figures are scarce since shipping companies are reluctant to admit their losses, but in 1994 Cape Town’s harbour master said that in recent years over 40,000 containers had been officially reported as lost from the decks of Atlantic container ships. In October 1998 one ship alone lost 406 in a storm in the Pacific. A single ship can carry over 5,000 at a time. Estimates of losses vary from 1,000 to 10,000 a year.

  The problem for the likes of us, as today’s Navtex warning has highlighted, is that containers toppling off a ship’s deck do not immediately, or inevitably, sink to the sea floor. Some are so buoyant that they travel hundreds of miles with the tide before sinking. Some never sink at all and float ashore with their cargo intact, as the refurbishments in many a small coastal village will testify. Containers of fro
zen meat, on the other hand, float 9/10ths under water for some time, sink as air is lost, rise again as the meat putrefies and then finally sink to the bottom.

  To put things in context, Voyager is 40 feet long, made of fibre-glass, designed to cut through water and weighs 11 tons. An industrial container is 20’ x 8’ x 8’ 6”, built of steel with heavily-reinforced edges and sharp corners, designed to resist damage in collision with similar materials and weighs anything from 20 to 40 tons.

  Six of them, which may or may not be visible above the surface, are not a happy prospect, especially in the present rough sea. With several feet exposed above the water they are relatively easy to see in good conditions if you are keeping a constant lookout. Viewed from the deck of a yacht, however, where your line of vision is only about eight feet above sea level, they can be invisible among even moderate waves until it is too late. In poor visibility or at night, or floating just below the surface, you have no chance at all of avoiding them.

  The sea calms gradually and happily there is no sign of any floating containers. The sun comes out and it gets very warm. At 1pm we alter course sufficiently to turn off the engines and beat our way under sail. But early evening, just as we have to make our final turn between two reefs into Bayona, the GPS shows No Position Found. Nor can we see the buoy in the water, nor the marker on the shore, that are there to lead you into the harbour via a safe channel through the reefs. Staring across sunlit water looking for the markers causes star-bursts to explode inside my throbbing head.

  Despite the best efforts of both of us, the markers remain elusive. However, David calculates that when we are one and a half miles north of Cape Silleiro we can turn safely towards Bayona. We use the radar to tell us when we are the necessary one and a half miles north of the cape.

  Despite our intention to anchor wherever possible, we plan to spend three days in Bayona’s marina. The prime reason is so that David can repair the damage our port bow sustained in La Coruña, but we also need to get our gas tanks filled and find a launderette. We should also like to spend a little time in the town. Our previous stopover here had been very brief and it is somewhere we have always wanted to revisit.

  As David makes our approach I go out on deck to tie on mooring ropes and fenders. It is hot and muggy now and the sea is very choppy. Far from relishing the prospect of getting re-acquainted with Bayona all I really want to do is lie down in a darkened room.

  ‘Fuel?’ shouts a man in blue overalls leaning against a pump when we are still some yards off the waiting pontoon, which doubles as a fuel dock. I am about to say ‘No’ when David says, ‘Yes.’ It is the sensible thing to do. It will save trouble later when the dock might be crowded or weather conditions bad, and with full tanks you can leave whenever you want. My head is roaring.

  In addition to the turbulence of the water, there is the usual strong wind blowing that always materializes whenever you approach a pontoon. So, while David concentrates on not demolishing our starboard hull, or the dinghy somebody has abandoned just where our bows really need to be, I straddle the foredeck rail with my bow rope, waiting to jump.

  This is just the moment when the man leaning against the diesel pump starts to interrogate me about whether we want a berth or not, how big we are, how long we want to stay and what sort of fuel we want. With the pontoon rising and falling quite vigorously to a different rhythm from that of our boat, I judge my moment and running to a cleat on jarred ankles tell him yes, diesel, and three nights, please.

  He says two nights on a pontoon and one on a buoy; but as I rush for the stern rope before Voyager’s back end takes off I’m of a mind to agree to almost anything. By the time we’ve tied on a spring and are ready to receive the fuel gun from him – he’s gone.

  We stand around in the heat for 10 minutes and just when we’ve decided to hell with it and head for Lisbon, he comes back and hands over the diesel gun. I pass it across to David. He puts the nozzle into the tank, touches the lever, and a blowback sends diesel flying all over the cockpit. I rush to the galley for a pair of rubber gloves, washing up liquid and kitchen roll to clean it up before it can get walked into the saloon carpet.

  Diesel is foul stuff. Get it in fabric and you never get rid of the smell. Get it in a small break in your skin, and the resulting infection can take ages to heal. Your heart aches for marine life every time you hear of a major diesel spill at sea. Even the unregarded minor spillage at the world’s refuelling docks, commercial and leisure, must maim a multitude every day.

  So here I am, all diesel slime, Marigold gloves and migraine and cue the Cruiser from Hell. This lovely-looking young Irish woman with long, lustrous red hair is half of a couple, although the young man with her says nothing beyond a brief initial greeting. Their boat, it seems, has been at anchor for some days and they have come over to refill their water tanks.

  It is only later, in a more charitable frame of mind, that I wonder if perhaps this is what happens when a taciturn man and a vivacious woman spend days isolated in close confinement together: she becomes effectively a solo sailor and when she corners someone she won’t stop talking.

  She immediately demands a blow-by-blow account of our journey. I can’t understand why, because they have recently travelled the same route as us. So why does she want intricate information about every stop we’ve made getting here?

  Where have we come from, she wants to know. And where are we going? Which stops have we made along the way?

  I wonder briefly if she might be working undercover for Customs and Immigration.

  Which rías have we stayed in? Worsened by the bending and the diesel fumes, my head is so bad now that I can’t remember.

  Did we stop in Viveiro or Ribadeo? I don’t know; all the names have merged into one. I suggest she asks David, who is hunched over the diesel gun trying to prevent another blow-back but he keeps his head well down and she continues interrogating me. Did we stop off at Pontevedra? I didn’t think so.

  I’m getting little coloured lights zigg-zagging down my peripheral vision now. What was the passage like between Ares and Laxe? Which other boats did we see?

  Why does she want to know? I keep wondering. Why does she never stop asking questions? Why doesn’t she get on and fill her bloody water tank and just leave me alone? I listen to the knocking inside my head and wonder if I might be having a stroke.

  At last David hands the fuel gun back to the attendant. All we need now is a berth to be allocated and directions how to find it and I can escape her; not rot in a Spanish jail for the inexplicable murder of a lovely Irish colleen. The attendant clunks the gun back into its holster and asks laconically if we are all right for water as he isn’t sure if there’s a tap where we are going.

  And so it goes on. While David goes to the office to pay for the fuel, I wait for her to finish using the solitary water hose. Had we come across a young English couple with engine trouble? Or the Swedes with the two children? Even after she has finished filling her tank and passes me the hose she shows no desire to leave the dock. Had it rained while we were in La Coruña? I don’t remember. I don’t have a single memory left about anything anymore; just an all-consuming desire to garrote her with the water hose and hurl her lifeless body into the sea.

  Our berth, when we finally reach it, has two water taps on it and I am pettishly pleased that the fuel pump attendant hadn’t received a tip.

  It is 9pm before we are tied up and we are too tired to get bathed and decently dressed and leg it across town to enjoy the promised meal. Instead I heat up some curry and cook the last of the brown rice. It is definitely the last brown rice I shall ever buy. It takes forty-five minutes of gas to cook it and despite its much-vaunted life-enhancing properties always tastes like boiled sand with grit in it.

  When gas has to be lugged aboard by hand you begin to read cooking times on the back of packets before buying them. You also begin to ignore traditional cooking rules, especially those involving boiling rice or pasta in gallons of water in an
open pan, and then rinsing it afterwards in gallons more. It’s a waste of water as well as gas and all that steam just makes your boat damp. A minimum of water with a lid on does just as well and I doubt that any but the most discerning palette would ever tell the difference. As for rinsing boiled rice, after throwing decades of culinary wisdom out the window I read that a research team somewhere has concluded now that it simply rinses away valuable nutrients anyway.

  Because of the direction of the wind, Voyager snatches violently at her mooring ropes all night.

  The following day is grey and overcast with intermittent drizzle. The lovely Bayona of happy memory looks like your worst British Bank Holiday Monday ever. At least the migraine has gone. We go in search of propane gas and a launderette. ‘Gas,’ everyone tells us, ‘is available in La Coruña. It’s the centre for gas.’ Nor does Bayona have a self-service launderette. There is a place at Vigo just down the coast which will collect your laundry and return it washed, ironed and aired four days later. And somebody on the pontoons thinks there might be a self-service place in the next town, a taxi-ride away, but it all seems like too much effort. When we get back to Voyager, David hauls out our remaining gas tank, estimates its contents by its weight, and decides it will last until Gibraltar. I decide our linen supply will too.

  We fill up the water tanks and give Voyager a thorough wash. A French woman from a neighbouring boat spends several hours on her knees beside us washing, rinsing and wringing nappies at one of the taps. Not for the first time do I reflect that a boating holiday with very young children is not much of a break for women.