Ría de Camariñas to Finisterre

Muxía in sunshine

We left Camariñas on the promise of westerly winds, Force 3-5, with the ría bathed in bright sunlight. Everything looked very different as we motored out to that we had seen as we had arrived the previous evening. The dull Muxía and its rather sombre church now looked spectacular, picked out by the morning light. We left them behind, motorsailing to the WSW as the wind turned out to be a very light and feeble south-westerly. There was a line of three huge thunderstorms to the west and south west of the coast and unfortunately our course took us directly towards the centre of one of the thunder cells. We really didn’t feel like getting thwacked by another thunderstorm, as we had the previous day, and so we motored more directly south to stay much closer in to Cap Touriñana and the rocks than we had originally planned.

Nicky spent a fascinated few hours watching the thunderstorms offshore grow and decay and the cumulus over the shore develop into some pretty severe cells under the influence of daytime heating. It was meteorology textbook stuff.

Approaching Cape Finisterre

Our strategy paid off and we avoided all the storm cells. Having rounded Cape Finisterre we had originally intended to anchor off Corcobión, in a branch of the ría to the north-east of Finisterre. However, Finisterre was in bright sunshine whereas Corcobión and most of the rest of the ría were in the shadow of various threatening, large, black cumulus clouds. We therefore elected to anchor in the outer reaches of Finisterre harbour. It turned out to be a great spot with a fantastic view of the nearby beach.