Very excited on March 23rd, 2019 at 6:45 am we lifted our anchor at Ile de Ré heading south to Spain after the winter. 180 nm through the Biscay alongside the French atlantic coast.
It was a beautiful day. The  weather god was definitely in a good mood. 10 knots of wind, no clouds and with the sun coming out the temperature reached a comfortable level – nice!
Still getting used to being back on the water again, we were not too disappointed that the wind was more and more decreasing. Well, it is certainly more comfortable to have less wind than too much in the beginning… so at about midday we decided to use the engine.

We undoubtly enjoyed being back on the water and were just happy to watch the long atlantic waves when we saw them!  🙂 Yes! The dolphins!  This time we were all prepaired. The dolphins in posing mood and we had our camera ready! It was unbelievable. So many of them! They were following us for quite a while. They went off and came back again and they loved playing and swimming in front and next to our bow. They are soooo cute!
We were so happy and excited about the dolphins that the day passed by quickly.

Just when we had our dinner, a little exhausted bird joined us. Poor little bird flew into our cabin and was completely stressed when we tried to free it. In the end it was resting in front of our boat and we were prepairing ourselfes for our first night sail.

As I was very tired from all the impressions of the day :-). I took the momentum and went to bed at 8pm. Like this –  no decision for mi capitano, he had to do the first night shift. 🙂
It was a calm night and a smooth sail where nothing exciting happened. A few fishing boats, beautiful stars, the milky way and just like this the night went by. If I remember right we were roughly at the height of Arcachon early Sunday morning.

The new day was as georgeous as the old one, perfect weather and again so many dolphins that we were slowly getting used to them. Meant not taking millions of photos anymore, just hundreds :-). And we think we might even have seen small whales or maybe very big black dolphins? We don’t know, we couldn’t get proper pics as they were quite far away.
In the afternoon we had again a temporarely joining crew member. An unfearful little bird who landed directly on my shoulders! That was a sweet surprise. This little guy really liked staying with us. He was so fearless that we had to watch out for him not to hurt him as he was fetching insects on the floor and everywhere. Inbetween he liked resting on Norberts head or shoulder, he even liked staying in our hands – unbelievable. He drank the water which we provided, well he acted like he was our family member for ages. After a couple of hours he was even getting a little naughty. He went into our salon and wanted to stay there – I guess it was because it was much warmer… But we didn’t want him to stay down there, so I asked him to get out. He didn’t move so I – honestely- had to take him in my hands and lift him into the cockpit! This sweet cheeky little bird. 🙂

But suddenly the weather changed and it got foggy and cold. We needed to put on warm cloth and needed to watch the sea and radar. Because of the fog we were a little bit concerned as we were close to San Sebastián and didn’t want to enter our first anchorage at night AND with fog. Fortunately the fog disappeared as we approached the shore so we only had to cope with the darkness and our excitement. The leading lights of the bay were easy to see, so getting in was no issue. As we were the only boat in the pretty big bay we had no problem finding an anchorage. At 9:05 pm the achor was dropped, we were happy and tired. Welcome Spain.