Askari Sailing: Isla Salvora and Combarro

We upped anchor at our new early, which is 8am it was soooo muddy it took ages to clean it and get it safely stowed for our sail out of the Ria towards the islands.

There are four clusters of islands that make up the Galician Atlantic Islands National Park. A few weeks ago we applied for permission to enter the park; we had read that it can take ages but in fact it came back by email the very next business day. Then up to 3 days before and including on the day you can apply online to anchor in a particular group. You can only have three anchoring spots at anyone time, so it's a little hard to plan a cruise however it does stop people just blocking it out, as they only permit so many boats to anchor in each of the island groups. The weekend was approaching and the weather was looking good so when we went online we could only get 2 of the three places we wanted to visit as the spots had all been snapped up!!

So on Thursday we had both Isla Salvora and Isla Ons booked - Isla Salvora has even more restrictions on landing and anchoring as its a bird sanctuary, it's very rocky so we thought it would be okay for lunch only.... It turned out that we were the only boat there and it was stunning and very wild. We had a bit of an explore by dinghy but decided not to risk upsetting the birds by landing but instead returned to Askari for a BBQ lunch.

Bye bye beautiful Muros

Arriving in Isla Salvora

Exploring Isla Salvora by tender

Bird Paradise - no landing on this beach!

Askari all on her own at Isla Salvora

BBQ lunch at Isla Salver

After lunch we reviewed the weather and it looked like there was going to be a bit too much easterly in the wind to stay out out the islands so we had a gentle sail into Ria Pontevedra and anchored up near the top of the Ria in Combarro.

Only just enough wind to sail into the Ria

Combarro was a fabulous spot, the anchorage was much shallower than we have found recently and there was a huge space completely closed off from Atlantic swell. We had read that it was an interesting town so we tidied ourselves up and went ashore for dinner. The town was amazing, full of grain houses, witches and crosses (perhaps a bit superstitious here.....) plus the narrowest rock streets that had bearly changed since medieval times - there was a lot of Spanish tourists there but it was part of the fun.... We ended up having a great meal at Bodega O'Boci right on the sea front in a converted grain house while looking out on the harbour with a view of Askari.