Ria de Arosa to Culatra

O Nazareno was back in the church, with St Peter outside keeping the keys -

We wandered up to the woods behind the town, taking leave of sweet Galicia for another while. 

That evening the fiesta ended even more spectacularly than it had begun.

Time to think of the sea again, not quite in the same way as the guys on this tuna seiner!

I got Fiona back into it with a gentle afternoon sail to the Islas Cies, considerably tried as we anchored there by the fact that we were wasting a lovely fair breeze.

However it was still blowing in the morning, 

and Fiona put up with staying out the next night, as we powered down the Portuguese coast at up to 8 knots. The breeze died the next morning (24th September), so we went into Nazare rather than spend a second night out.

      I had passed it by in the past, thinking of the famous waves that the surfing dudes love, but actually it is a very good harbour. It is quite extraordinary how the massive breakers just across the bay don't affect the harbour overmuch. There is great interest on the quay at what this nice old boat has brought it -

Thankfully the swell had at last settled anyway, so next day we were able to enjoy the light breeze that took us the 26 miles or so down the coast to Peniche. We anchored in the harbour there, and pressed on with a better north wind in the morning to Cascais, with the sky clearing and the sun getting hot again. Still I wasn't inclined to linger, even though there was hardly any wind as we rounded Cabo Espichel -

and so came to Sesimbra-

It was gentle sailing or motoring all the way round Cape St Vincent, anchoring for a night at Sines and then at Sagres- 

A very sedate sail at 2 knots or less took us on to Lagos, for our usual date with Tony Simmonds at the Adega Marina. Yummy!

A fine breeze however took us on to Culatra,

and even jizzed up the fishing line enough to hook a very bonito bonito, even if he was small. That's the size that suits us, actually!

And so here we are chilling at Culatra again- 

The dull sky last night gave way to wind and rain this morning, but it's warm all the time and one knows it will soon blow over. The temperature is just perfect here at this time of year....

O Nazareno

I was welcomed into the bay of O Pobra do Caraminal by a 21 gun salute. Not for me of course, just the Spaniards banging off rockets for another blessed fiesta! But this, on the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, turned out to be just the start of the novena; a kind of count-down. Just as well, for the following couple of days were windy and wet. 

I wasn't long finding out what was up, in the baker's shop when I went ashore for bread. There on the counter was a pile of glossy programs for the Nazareno festival, coming up at the weekend. By Thursday, when I went to Santiago to meet Fiona off her flight from England, there were just a few showers; a bit cloudy on Friday, for Saturday and Sunday, not a cloud in the sky, apart from the ones caused by all the rockets!  They are inclined to make me cringe, like most grumpy old yachtsmen from the North, who value our peace and quiet, but the program had me interested.

It was full of the usual glossy ads, with the program of events and a welcome from the Mayor and the Commission who organised it. What was rather fascinating was that this wasn't just got up to make money and have some craic, though there was plenty of all that in it; I learned from the program that this fiesta had been held for over five hundred years. At its heart was the procession in which the statue of Jesus arraigned before Pilate, the Nazarene, was carried around the town. 

The spirit of the thing was actually straight out of the Middle Ages; the sort of thing that the Puritans drove out of Merry England all those five hundred years ago, in the name of pure religion; and the same baleful blight went on to affect all the English-speaking world. Religion became a private affair, while its social dimension was appropriated by the modern states, where, deprived of its transcendent basis, it has gradually withered away. 

So what of this 'impure' religion? Here are these Galicians, having a fine hooley to help put the magnificent summer behind them, to reconcile themselves to their lovely gardens dying and to knuckle down to another academic year, to another year of graft and struggling to make a living; plenty of them don't seem to take the religion bit very seriously at all. Sinners of all kinds cause hardly a raised eye-brow! And yet there is a certain innocence about it all, even the break-dancing and what passes for rock music here. What's more, though the drink flows, there's no real drunkenness to be seen. Above all, that dire sense of futility which haunts social activities with no spiritual footing, no window on Heaven, really seems absent.

For the spiritual heart of this fiesta beats away. Fiona and I were feeling a bit weary, and the idea of trailing round the streets in the heat was not attractive, but we were soon born along by the energy of the crowd; it turned out to be enjoyable to follow the swaying statue to the beat of the music.

Between the vigil and Sunday, there were 18 masses in the church, all packed. Fiona and I were extremely lucky to get about the last two seats at the Bishop's mass; he had come from Santiago to follow the Nazarene, and called upon Him 'to bless us and to show us our way, as pilgrims on the road of life'. And when on the vigil we had joined the crowd outside the church, and the voice of the priest from the loudspeaker ensconced in the old stone belfy proclaimed 'this is my body', one really felt it referred to all those people, to all of us; we do after all comprise the body of Christ.

Not that anyone stops to notice who is 'true believer'; at least as far as I see the believers and the secularists seem to have found out how to live together round here, though God knows a lot of pain has gone into the process. Are those dreadful Civil War scars really healed? At any rate, when it comes to getting money out of a secular government, the trick apparently is to call this carry-on cultural heritage and of touristic interest. It certainly does the local economy a power of good.

Meanwhile, these folk do social in little ways that we don't seem to be able to manage in Ireland, rubbish collection being a prime example, and good public spaces, and a proper little bus station with a cafe in every little town and plenty of bus shelters where one can sit on a bench out of the rain. But what's much more, they really do actually enjoy doing things en masse! This fiesta was fun; even I thought so!

They also do place; they evidently like to refer to Jesus as o Nazareno; he is a particular man from a particular place, not some abstract mythic hero. And they do food and they do family! They have a fine respect for physical reality. The cultural challenge we all face is to reintegrate all this with the one quality in which one might perhaps allow that the protestant cultures excell; the sense of personal responsibility!

*****

Going ashore - and a line of rubbish skips on the slip!

Supplies at the ready    

Vigil Mass


Pipers lead the way,

and the procession's off

Every one of those puffs was a bang!

The Anna M and the fishing fleet are at peace.

 Let the fun begin!

Nicolas is always busy about the marina, and on Monday morning, the ship that has been waiting patiently in the bay comes in, but they'll knock another day out of it in the town, and the pipes are soon swirling again,

while we're waiting for that north wind to kick in!

Sherkin - O Pobra do Caraminal

Matthew and Niall only had six days to spare, so it was a wonderful thing that a fine anticyclone set up over Ireland at just the right time. We left Horseshoe with a light northerly air at 2300 on the 5th September. By morning the wind had pulled round to the east, light but sufficient to give us over the magic five knots for a while, which is what I look for on a passage like this. From immediately after leaving for some 30 hours, we had a spectacular accompaniment of dolphins, particularly so at night, with their trails of brilliant phosphorescence.

After a very light spell in the middle of the  following day, it picked up again to give us a perfect sailing breeze, and the Anna M tramped south for the next couple of days. Gradually however it pulled round more southerly, and freshened up to force 5 perhaps one night to give us some lively and rather wet sailing. Then it moderated and veered to SSW. We were now about 100 miles off the Spanish coast, and going about, were able to lay Cabo Ortegal.

Finally, making one short tack off Cedeira, we were able to lay Corunna, though passing it to the southward we went up the Ria to Sada; a pleasant spot and cheaper, and still handy for the city with frequent buses. We were tied up there in just under the four days out from Sherkin, so the boys were able to rest and get themselves organised in good time to be home on the Friday. They took a train to Madrid that evening, for a Ryanair flight to Dublin next day; very good value I thought at Eur90, considering they only booked it the day before.

If that Niall sends me the nice photo he took of us all, I'll post it! So anyway I was able to anchor off, for an early start next day on my ownio. It was a beautiful morning; here is the Ria at dawn:

dotted with wee boats out fishing, whatever they jigging for! And here is Sada as I sailed gently down the Ria:

past O Coruna and the old Roman lighthouse, the Torre de Hercules:

.

Wind got too light then, especially since there was a nasty swell getting into it. Eventually it freshened, but from the south-west, so I was glad to find a sheltered corner to anchor for the night at Lage. Very light NW air the next day, and an even worse swell, so I was even more glad to leave a grey and grim Costa do Muerte behind and find a brighter sky and good berth behind the breakwater of Fisterra for the next windy day.

Yes, south of it is definitely the place to be after mid-September, though I was only given one middling day to get myself safely down past the Ria de Muros and Cabo Corrubedo -

round Isla Salvora

 and into the Ria de Arosa, where there was a big fleet of fishing boats

more or less like this one, but they turned out to be in a huge circle,

and guess what, they were all fishing one huge seine net!  Well, the Spaniards sure do know how to work together, but God help the sardines or whatever they were after!

I was glad to get both anchors down off O Pobra do Caraminal, and settle down to this blogging lark. Hurray, I'm up-to-date, and I'll try to keep it that way. Now the glass is rising, the wind settling, sunshine forecast for tomorrow, and Fiona coming..... 

On Sailing the Gannetsway

This is going to be a different kind of post, and one which if you are just following the story on a mobile phone, you might like to skip; but I thought it time to spell out the background and aims of this blog, so if you can, make yourself comfortable for a serious bit of a read; I wrote it while Anna M was at rest in Horseshoe Bay.

I grew up in Hastings, with a view over the Channel, fading to an empty horizon. However, I was fortunate enough to discover that if one sailed out into that apparent emptiness, behold, as our familiar England receded, another country appeared; here things were different, and they spoke another language. Thus France became an invisible presence in my life, and among other things, I learnt that the fact of not seeing something by no means indicates that it is not there. As Lewis Carroll had it:-

‘What matters it how far we go?’ his scaly friend replied.

There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.

The further off from England the nearer is to France-

Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.

  Will you, wo’n’t you, will you, wo’n’t you, will you join the dance?

  Will you, wo’n’t you, will you, wo’n’t you, wo’n’t you join the dance?

I gradually perceived that in fact the human race is haunted by invisible presences, and what's more, beyond or perhaps even closer than them all there lurks a Biggy. I grew in the conviction that the Catholic faith was entirely reasonable, and to believe that reality was indeed as revealed in the story, church and person of Jesus Christ.

However, it turned out that it was frequently easier and more comfortable to ignore it and pretend to oneself that this awe-inspiring reality was but a dream. European history turned above all on efforts to make images, to fabricate worlds that men could live with (while the women whom they were trying to please tended to criticise, not being quite satisfied with anything short of the Biggy), and on the tension between the two; the castles of ego wherein we play at being 'king of the castle', and the cathedrals whereby we at least try to express the aspiration to transcend ourselves in Christ.

We like of course to have it both ways: we make a castle of our nation for instance and also try to make out that it is actually The Kingdom; but There no earthly passport avails at the gates! Man's ways are not God's ways; He continually brings forth truth by revealing the falsehood of our propositions. Our God is a humourist, who can turn even our tragedies into comedies. The castles crumble, and even the cathedrals, but through Christ's cross, our defeats may be turned into victories. Even men's vilest castles represent some kind of fumbling effort to realise the Kingdom, which fact, discovered, enables us even to forgive the knaves who make them.

Our Lady is Mother of the Church, and so essential to Catholicism, because she firmly points beyond any attempt to bring forth the Kingdom by way of an earthly paternity. She is a much more radical feminist than those who sadly just want to be fathers themselves, and play 'king of the castle' with the best of them! Like the socialists with whom they associate, the impulse from which they start is fine, but they go wrong when they refuse to kneel to the Cross.

Thus Jeremy Corbyn, admirable and honest and refreshing though he may be, will only join the long line of duped or disastrous socialists unless he really attends to reality and gets back to the roots of that impulse. In Ireland, a retiring senior Labour minister has just illustrated fairly well, in a speech to the Party faithful, how with all good-will, they go wrong: ‘We have been a lonely tribe of adventurers, pioneers and visionaries who said we will transform this country in a way that it was never transformed before…. We have brought this country into the 21st century… when they never gave us a mandate to do it within a vote that is beyond 19pc!’

These are the guys who like to lecture us Catholics about democracy! It smells of hypocrisy to me. I do not say that one does not need leadership within democracy, but a real democrat will be trying to bring out and build on the sense of responsibility in ordinary people, and to truly empower them, not foisting the latest progressive fashion on them, let alone buying their votes when they get a chance because the price of oil happens to be low.

All this is not to say that our earthly efforts are entirely vain, as Buddhists apparently maintain. As boyish games grow muscles for greater undertakings, so in social efforts and in art and projects of all kinds, we can begin to transcend our ego and to participate in the  Kingdom; indeed it may even be given to us to help build it, if only, like Mary, we firstly listen to the quiet voice which tells us how to do so, the angelic voice both within and forever beyond.

This listening involves being fully present, like Mary at the foot of the Cross, and therefore true to ourselves, while attending to every breath of the wind, and all the 'minute particulars' before us. That sailor is quickly punished who fails to pay attention to them, while it is no use claiming to praise and honour God if we do not firstly admire and appreciate and respect His creation, all the while listening, and then do our part, however small, to respond and care for it!

A journey is involved, from slavery to the Promised Land; a dance, it has been called. It involves both difficulty and consolation; my favourite image is that of sailing the sea, in a sailing boat of course, not some great machine. From that first stretching across the Channel, sailing has extended my terrestrial home to the 'Gannetsway', where the gannets fly from Scotland to the south of the Iberian Peninsula.

It is an antidote to a way of living that, unheeding of the angelic voice, has become too abstract, too heady and compartmentalized, which has lost its sense of history and even, for all its zooming about, its sense of place; which frequently no longer appears even to have much of a future and certainly spends most of its time in a fog, with little idea of where it may be going!

So in faith we have to 'pick up the stitches' of our history and geography, our languages and arts. My 'home country' involves (particularly but not exclusively) the interplay of the European peoples of the Eastern Atlantic, Celtic, British, Iberian.... If here, after all the centuries of strife, we could learn to sing and dance together, what a gift it would be to the world!  

Meanwhile, I seek to get to know and to celebrate this Gannetsway, mile by mile, with difficulty and delay and much fun, in a wooden sailing boat which is ageing like myself, and only stays afloat by the Grace of God!

Joe Aston, September, 2015.