Yet another hot, sunny day almost without wind. We stayed until after lunch, hoping for a little breeze in the afternoon for us to sail the 15 miles or thereabout to the next of the Rias; Ria de Pontevedra.

In the morning hours I studied Ann Hammicks's pilot; 'The Atlantic Islands', Madeira, the Canaries and Cape Verde are on our not so fixed itinerary, but first we'll explore the Portuguese coast and above all, Porto and Lisboa. We may go to take a closer look at the Algarve Coast as well, but we feel it is important to be able tp improvise, to go one step at the time. For us, a fixed schedule or itinerary would seriosly hamper the whole experience of cruisong.


Around 3PM a just about noticeable breeze made pattern in the water of the anchorage. Despite NE were forecasted (as usual since we came here) it seemed like SW. A headwind. We weighed anchor anyway, hoping that the wind would be favourable once we came out of the Ria. That was not to happen so we motored once again and anchored just opposite a long sandy beach in the centre of the town of Sanxenxo a few hundred meters east of Porto Novo. They both have marinas, but we do not feel that paying some 15-20 �'� in a marina adds anything useful to our quality of life. we have three solarpanels on board, and when the weather is as sunny as it is now, they produce more power than we consume. We also carry six batteries, so we can keep running computer, radar and navigation lights for four daays i a row without any sun or having to run the engine for charging the batteries. In our opinion, this is the key to happy and self-sufficient crusing.