We had only three weeks left on our Schengen visas. As American visitors, we had to get out - but we had quite a way to sail in those short 3 weeks!
We has just landed into La Coruña Spain and needed to get all the way down to Morocco or risk becoming illegal immigrants of the Schengen zone!
This little problem presented us with a sailing distance of around 1100km and meant we'd need to make several overnight hops down the coasts of Spain and Portugal and then Spain again, before jumping across the Gibraltar straights over to our final destination, outside of the Schengen zone: Tangier, Morocco.
Three weeks was not a lot of time to see all the sights along the way for any length of time. So as a compromise, we decided to choose four ports, in addition to La Coruña and Tangier. We spaced out these destinations by either one or two nights of sailing. And, we would time our sailing hops to land during daytime hours. This plan would allow us to spend several days in each visited port to get a good sample of the local vibe.
So we'll cover our stops from this trip here including:
La Coruña, Spain
Bayona, Spain
Cascais, Portugal
Lagos, Portugal
Cadiz, Spain
And we'll end up in Tangier, Morocco.
After this little trip, we plan to spend at least 3 months in Tangier to recover our 90 to of the past 180 Schengen Visa allocation days. So Tangier will be in a following blog.
La Coruña, Spain
La Coruña was a completely new and unheard of city for us. We were expecting a small, rather isolated little town with perhaps donkeys and carts and some old pick up trucks carrying loads of oranges along dusty roads..... honestly we had not heard of it. We landed in to a modern port with large, Spanish modern art structures, like the Tower of Hercules. Wow. As were led into the Marina Nautico by a friendly dock master in a dinghy, we found that we had landed right into the city center of a humming, vibrant community of tourism and full of festivities.
This is a large place - the largest city and industrial and financial center of the Galicia region. We happened to arrive during the annual Maria Pita Festa accompanied by free concerts throughout the month of August day and night on multiple stages and cafes full of people eating Tapas & sipping wine. Why is this place not famous? Perhaps it is, and it was just our ignorance having previously only visited the Mediterranean side when visiting Spain. Most of the tourists did seem to be Spanish (of course) so perhaps La Coruña is a common place to go for fun if you live in the Galicia region. It left us feeling a little naive...
Anyway, we feel that La Coruña is a solid 8/10 kind of tourist destination city, for a weeks tourist visit it's a great idea. Each Square within the citys has some form of music or entertainment venue taking place. Religious Sounding Choral singing, Rock bands, bands for children and Folk music. Something for everyone and all for Free. Apparently there are a continuous series of festivals that run all the time.
And Tapas!! Cool! With lots of Iberian Ham.. the Spanish speciality it appears...
Plus a small pleasant but windy beach and a nice little castle at the port entrance.
La Coruña's little narrow interconnecting streets are lined with fun cafes and we often had difficulty finding a table as the streets were jam packed at times. When a big band was getting close to it's starting time, the surround streets seemed to jam up with people getting their munching and drinking in before grabbing a seat at the show..
There are two marinas in La Coruña and are quite different from each other. One is in the central city (Marina Nautico), and the other a km or so out of the center (La Coruña Marina) is much quieter and has a fuel dock. This latter marina would be a plan-B for us in the future.
Our Nautico Marina was great. This city center location was 9/10. Essentially within 2 mins walking distance of the strip of cafes and 1 minute to the first music stage. Good finger pontoons although the wood is being replaced when it's been rotted out a bit. Good Security. A Bar at the dock with, literally a tanker delivering beer. We'd never seen beer delivered by a tanker truck before..
Reasonably nice toilets and showers but missing as usual, hooks and benches. Friendly dock staff ...and of course the usual AWFUL marina WiFi. We had to run up to the marina office daily as they would change the wifi password for some unknown reason. Like many marinas, WiFi systems are something that is an unknown entity and all conversations end up with shoulder shrugging. "Bring on WiFi 6" !! is all we can say.. We really do need new highly simplified 'management' user interface for Wifi so that folks like marina managers can manage their WiFi and not have to revert to the 'technical expert' who is always only available, 'next week'.
Yet another thing for AI to tackle to make life better... Over he next couple of years Wifi6 should make a good bit of difference.. once everyone upgrades to use it, especially in the case of marinas where lots of customer with masts are trying to competed for poorly distributed radio channels.
Attention all marinas. Upgrade to 802.11ax WAP's NOW PLEASE!??!?
We enjoyed La Coruna for a week and then head back out to sea and around the corner to start our journey south to start running in what is arguably the beginning of the Tradewinds, the Galecia Coast.
Our first sail in Spain was an over night trip to Baiona. A simple sail that started off in light winds, head on and then picked up to 20~25knots on our starboard aft quarter. A simple 24-hour, overnight sail got us into Bayona by midday.
Bayona, Spain
Bayona is a small fishing town that has a population boom during the summer tourist season. A couple of marina frontage pretty streets represented the tourist cafe strip. There is also a very pleasant harbor entrance castle with a really great walled, gravel walkway around it, with sea cliffs below.
This is the highlight of a Bayona visit we think. The Cliff/Castle walk is very pleasant.
For those looking for small, quaint and quiet. Bayona is ideal.
Our marina was small with a little travel lift that looks like perhaps 15 tons capable. Good showers and a guard security entrance. No key cards.
7/10
Cascais, Portugal
We sailed for two nights down to Portugal avoiding fishing pots along the way as best we could. Cascais was perhaps or favorite town, since leaving La Coruña.
Cascais makes a lot of sense for sailors hoping to avoid having to sail all the way into Lisbon. Right on the entrance way to the Lisbon estuary, it's the perfect stopping point. It's relatively expensive though, but you get what you pay for; Cascais is a classy place. The Casino Estoril located her inspired Ian Fleming to write his book 'Casino Royal'. And since, the Hotel Palacio was the scene of Jame's Bond's On Her Majesty's Seceret Service. For centuries, Portuguese royalty and nobility located their holiday homes here, driving up the housing market to now be the highest in Portugal.
But it's not like a Monaco, black tie sort of place, it is a relaxed place that is far better.
Cascais also had summer Festas with free concerts on the stage occupying the beach front and some great local rock music was being played to the delight of a beach full of tourists. We also loved the signature Portuguese limestone Mosaic sidewalks. They seems to be ubiquitous and distinct to Portugal.
The Marina, opened in 1999, is well run, a little tight, but very well maintained. It's run by Super friendly folks and within crawling distance to a strip of cafes; the first of which is run by a some very sweet Brazilian sisters who make that delicious Brazillian Cheese bread - made from Casava flour.
As Americans and an American registered boat, we had to check into Portugal and met a very nice man who ran the local customs office. He spent a lot of time telling us about the local history of the area and how welcome we were. Nothing official about it, just friendly and 'normal.
Cascais is a very liberal feeling area, the streets are very pleasant, clean, artsy, not overly crowded and just a pleasant place to hang. We gave Cascais a simple 9/10.
Lagos, Portugal
We didn't think much of Lagos although sailing through the entrance with a long narrow channel and the lifting bridge was fun. But Lagos was primarily a British tourist destination, presumably visiting as part of a cheap package holiday. Why is it British tourists are only interested in cheap? Most of the cafes catered to the British - serving chips with soccer or rugby playing on the large screen TV. We left Lagos after a 2 day sample.
A well maintained but very large marina with security gates and tons of tourists staring in..
2/10
Cadiz, Spain
We arrived on a Sunday. The Marina, Puerto America, is a government run marina, set out of the end of a long concrete breakwater. In between the Marina and the down town area is a large container depot. A long walk to the down town and not a super pretty walk.
The Marina docking was a bit tight getting to the visitor's dock but has good security and reasonable showers.
The marina offered no WiFi so we didn't stay long.
We didn't have cellular service in Portugal as we just didn't have time to buy the required SIM cards.
We really do need a simple, worldwide cellular service. Our little case of country specific SIM cards is now overflowing!
Anyone know of a worldwide system that we can subscribe to? Please tell?
Our Score? Marina 2/10 and city 6/10.
Tangier, Morocco
We crossed from Cadiz to Tangier one the Gibraltar straights, setting off from Puerto Africa in the early am. The seas were dead calm as we motored out of the port. Early rising fishermen in their tiny boats dotted the water as they set up their fishing lines and floats.
The wind stayed calm until we reached the straights. Then mounted up through 20 knots to a brisk 25~30knots in the channel itself.
We shot one the Gibraltar Straights TSS dodging the super tankers and cargo ships at 7~8 knots of boat speed. We wee dead into the wind across the channel but Chloe performed perfectly in this 2~3m conditions, peaching the waves instead of bumping over them. She's a submarine alright!
As we neared the Tangier port a military Frigate shot out; Man they can move. We wondered what Tangier was going to be like...
In our Next blog we'll spend some time detailing Tangier and the new Tanja Bay Marina (Tanja Marina Bay) that's being built out there.
And finally, in our continuing, small effort of trying to help our little blue planet - along the way we worked hard on our laptops by adding to the functionality of our EVHotels App.
The App designed to help electric car drivers find hotels al over the world, that offer electric car charging.
We're hoping that touring electric car drivers will start to use hotels more and more as a mainstream way of charging up their cars while they sleep. As you can see from our land tour blogs, we certainly did. It beats having to wait for an hour next to a roadside charger. We're getting ready to release a new version 1.7 with a whole bunch more EVHotels in its database. We're targeting 20,000 hotels this time! So don't leave home in your EV without a copy on your iPhone/Pad. Cheers!!
