May 13 – Mai 25, 2019; 549 nm and 62 days after departure from La Rochelle

A Coruña is located at the north western tip of Galicia and thereby as well of Spain. It is a modern town with a lot of history and with its approximately 250.000 inhabitants quite big. It has a picturesque old city with beautiful narrow paved streets and a lot of houses with the typical galicien glassed-in balconies. According to our guide Maria Pita, the fronts facing the marine promanade is the longest in Galicia in this style. Or, long story short, it is a great and absolutely worth visiting town 🙂 .

What I liked most though, were the very helpful and friendly people. Again, of course we had to find parts and stuff for our projects. This time I was desperate to find drawstring as I was (and still am) trying to create a working mosquito net for our hatches. (It is very important as I am the one who gets tormented by the critters). Now the question, where to find that? My guess was trying a fabric store. That is also amazing (well, at least to me), how many people here do buy fabrics and soooooo many meters. unbelievable! And you have to wait, even if you have only one person ahead of you, you wait for ages… but it is worth it.

Now my turn! With my perfect sentence:” Estoy buscando plomo para la cortina” they all melt away only to explain that they don’t offer it. I learned that I can find it in a “Mercerìa” ( haberdashery, Kurzwarengeschäft). I don’t even know if we still have mercerìas in Germany, but they are very commen here. I just love them. They offer corsetry, lingerie, nightwear and stuff like thread and drawstring and more. Crazy cute little shops 🙂 . Anyhow I should stop wandering… The people then explained as well where I can find the mercerìa and one helpful lady asked me to wait as she would accompany me. So nice! It turned out she used to be an english teacher, that made the conversation to our destination very easy and also interesting.

The team at the Marina Nautico was also extremly helpful and super kind. El Capitano was still looking for his needed threaded bar made of brass (Messinggewindestange) for his radio antenna. He just couldn’t find it anywhere, ordering it online always would have taken too much delivery time. His last chance was asking the marina team. They took care of it, called some retailers and within hours they found it. It was even brought to the marina, great service!!! Learned lesson: if you need to find something, just ask the marina office for help. 🙂

A Coruńa is for sailors a very pleasant stop. Especially in the Marina Nautico as it is located right in the town which makes it easy to reach the city facilities. We spent two nights in the Marina Coruńa which is ok, but you have to walk far just to reach the sanitaries and it turned out to be more expensive. Either going south or north it is a great place for provisioning, get some repairs done or just relax in a safe place to recover from a long passage. We guessed that is the reason why we saw suddenly not only English or French boats, but also quite a lot Norwegian, Danish and Swedish boats. For the first time we also met a German couple, yeah. Some of them were heading north, some south like us and a Dutch boat was going to sail to the Azores. Again amazing to realize how many sailors are out there.

One evening we went out for dinner with our friend Laurence and another single handed sailor from Norway, John. We decided to try the galicien delicassy ” Percebes” which is, well what is it? A kind of seafood, I think it is called ” barnacles” in english (Entenmuschel). It looks a bit strange and not very delicious to eat. Brave as we were we tried it. 🙂 It looks like this:

You need to open it and suck the rubber-like meat dry. I was expecting a heavenly yummi seafood taste similar to oysters, but it didn’t taste much at all. Ok, sometimes you win sometimes you loose. 😉 Fortunately we also had luscious baby scallops, common razor shells and the classic “Gambas al ajillo”. The dinner and the evening was saved.

Of course we went to Santiago de Compostela as it was only half an hour ride by train and we visited most of the highlights in A Coruńa including the interesting guided tour through the old town. Though our favorite is just sitting in little cafes watching the people or enjoy a nice glass of wine in “Jamonerìa” where mainly locals linger. Yammi.

After almost two weeks in town and in the marina, cuddling with closely spaced boats left and right we were ready to move on. Rìas, we’re coming!