Sada

After the holiday weekend we had arranged with Antón to get the boat lifted out at the marina at Sada, which is in the first Ria north of A Coruña. The Ría de Betanzos. 9 am saw us ' springing off ' Dark Tarn against a stiffening breeze from The N.W. I must admit I was glad The French yacht opposite us who were also getting ready to leave were watching as it was flawless.......

We motored into the wind for 5 miles to the entrance to the Ria, waves were quite big and occasional waves would break over the bows. We chugged up the Ria past isolated islands and fish farms as the wind rose to force 5. We entered the marina and Antón got on the radio from the bank to tell us there would be a slight delay so we quickly berthed against a hammerhead, again flawless!

After 5 minutes or so Antón again got on the VHF and told us that we needed to enter the lifting dock backwards! Dark Tarn like most boats with a big mast up the front doesn't handle well astern particularly with the wind " blowing us on " it was a little fraught but again all done without too much fuss.

A wee bit of a tight squeeze.

As the boat came up on the slings the bottom seemed fairly clean apart from some light fouling, no barnacles and just a few small crustaceans round the rudder. 

This lack of barnacles may have something to do with the fact that they eat gooseneck barnacles in this part of Spain, I must admit they don't look too appetising, but I am assured they are delicious.

Of course it could just be our anti-fouling paint and the good job we had made of putting it on in Conway, which seems a long time ago now............

The yard guys drove our precious home to the scrub off section where they proceeded to power wash the hull.

As we had anti fouled the hull last May in Conway, leaning against the harbour wall we had been unable to  paint the bottom of the keel. One of the guys scraped the bottom with a big metal scraper the rest of the hull needed just a quick wash off.

After we had retired to a local cafe for coffee and had been pleasantly surprised at the price we watched as the yard men chocked Dark Tarn up on what effectively were four tree trunks. I hooked up the electricity and examined the hull . It became evident that we would need to spend a little time on maintainance as several areas of the epoxy undercoat had.blistered and were exposing bare steel. I used the angle grinder to clean them up and we then gave them a coat of metallic primer. Most of the sacrificial anodes on the hull were still serviceable but the shaft anode was on its last legs, luckily when the well stocked chandlery opened at 5 o'clock they had one the perfect size, so I bought two!

I polished the prop and then had a shower while Lynne made tea. That evening we walked out onto the breakwater to have a better look at our temporary home.

Dark Tarn is in the yard with the floodlights.

We will stay here and complete a refit trying to get through the list of jobs, hopefully in less than a week.

That night we were getting used to being land creatures again, the wind died down and in a strange way I was quite looking forward to being a " yardie" for a while.........