Castro Urdiales

Just eight miles from Bilbao lies the harbour of Castro Urdiales, nestled below a castle of the Knight’s Templar and a church whose flying buttresses are so slender and plentiful that at night it resembles an insect.

The weather forecast for the next few days was very stable and we were using this stop as a way to take nine miles off a forty-mile leg to Santander the next day.  We had left Bilbao in the early evening and were moored between two buoys under the shelter of a large breakwater by 8.30pm, in time for dinner in the cockpit watching the sun set over the old Spanish town.

I think this is the first place we have moored without going ashore, but we wanted to make an early start for Santander in the morning, and with our record of getting up in the morning we needed an early night!

We got up on time!  In Bilbao we had bought a short-wave radio because we were now struggling to receive Radio 4 or 5 reliably and wanted to receive the BBC World Service.  This wonderful new device had an alarm that woke us up with the most fiendish interference I have ever heard, getting us out of bed quite promptly!  Apparently with short-wave you have to tune to different frequencies at different times of the day and the frequency that had worked so well the previous evening conspired to wake us better than a pneumatic drill ever could the following morning.