I have long thought Jacques Brel the best poet of Belgium, and indeed, of all the "Low Countries." His song "Marieke" was running through my head all the way from Ghent to Bruges, and on a gray October morning we went out into the "donk're licht" and followed the canal around Bruges toward Ostende, where we met the "stomme wind." Because of mechanical problems with the Krakelebrug drawbridge, we had to wait for quite a while in the Doksluis,

Just before the twin breakwaters, we turned left into the Montgomery Dok and found a berth at the Royal North Sea Yacht Club, somewhat sheltered from the wind by the high breakwater walls.

Early the next morning, we went through a sharp squall line running south from Dover, and the wind went to the Northwest, gusting to 45 knots. We reduced speed and headed inshore a little for a better angle on the waves and in hopes of finding a little lee. By noon we were only at 8' West Longitude, or just south of Brighton. The wind had meanwhile clocked to the Northeast, and conditions were a little better, but we were tired and decided to head for Portsmouth. As we moved into the Solent we made better time, and just inside the entrance to Portsmouth Harbor we found Haslar Marina on our port side and were secured alongside by 16:50. We went happily to a local pub for a pint and dinner.

I did one minor repair in Gosport; our InReach satellite communicator was sending out tracking points very irregularly, and with an Atlantic crossing coming up, this was a concern. After some email correspondence

We lay over another day in Gosport to let the weather settle. The VHF announced that the Harbor would be briefly closed, and then we saw the great bulk of the destroyer HMS Defender slide down the harbor, accompanied by tugs and armed picket boats.

Our next port was to be Concarneau, in Bretagne, with an option to cut it short and run into Brest or Douarnenez if the weather turned too awful. This is a trip of almost 300 miles, or just about 40 hours, so we set out in the early afternoon so as to arrive in daylight.

We dodged the many ferries in the Solent and at 17:00 cleared the Needles, at the western end of the Isle of Wight in beautiful conditions. The tide was with us, for once, and the sea was calm under a light north-westerly wind.

We took a sharp jag to cut across the traffic lanes off Cherbourg, and ran about south-west to pass off Portsall and round the tip of Bretagne via the Chenal du Four. All around western Bretagne there were fishing boats; they did not want to talk to us on the VHF, but they always passed clear of us. By midnight on our second day out, we were through the narrow passage off Pointe du Raz and headed southeast along the Breton south coast.

We didn't know where we were going to berth, but we figured that a fishing port would surely have somewhere, and after we came in by the buoyed channel through the sandbanks and ledges, we saw a clear T-head in the yacht harbor on our port hand. By 08:27, we were secured, and walked the length of the float system and up the long gangway to the Harbormaster's office.

Except that it is a major fishing port, we knew very little about Concarneau. It was founded in the 8th century and fortified, principally against the English. While Barbara went to the market and talked to our temporary neighbors, I wandered about the walled Old City, taking pictures and trying to imagine what it was like in the 17th century, when Vauban arrived and ordered improvements to adapt to the age of gunnery. I must confess to a soft spot for Vauban, ever since exploring his (at that time, 1967, very neglected and thus quite open and accessible) fortifications in the cliffs around Luxembourg.

We stayed over a day, and I did some maintenance, replacing belts on the engine and generally checking things over before crosing the Bay of Biscay.

The watch was kept busy dodging the ship traffic for Bordeaux and St. Nazaire, which did help pass the time. Saturday night, the moon was bright and the wind was northeast, about 18 knots, with an easy swell, and at daybreak on Sunday the Spanish coast was in sight.

We were headed for La Coruña, the western-most port on the north coast of Spain and for a long time the capital of Galicia, until it was replaced as capital by Santiago de Compostela in 1982. Actually, the official name of the city is A Coruña, the Galician form, but we have become accustomed to the Spanish form. There are not so many good harbors in the north of Spain, and La Coruña was already a Roman city (Brigantium) in the 2nd century BC. Just around the corner is Ferrol, an important commercial port today and the port the Spanish Armada sailed from in 1558.

The Old City, on a group of hills near the narbor, is well- preserved, with narrow streets, often with steps, and ancient stone buildings.

From our berth, we walked up a combination of steps and roads, across the Calle de Real Maestranza, the Street of the Royal Arsenal, dodged around some University buildings anad through a little street into the Plaza Santo Domingo, a fair-sized square dominated by the imposing facade of its church, but humanized by cafes on the other corners.

As befits its status as a major regional center, the Old City of La Coruña is dominated by military and ecclesiastical buildings. There is, however, a significant difference from most such cities in Northern Europe. There, of course, there are many convents and monasteries, but they were generally re-purposed as old people's homes or apartments. In La Coruña, in Catholic Spain, they are still in use, and we visited the public spaces of the Convent of Santa Barbara (now inhabited by a group of Poor Claires), and bought a medallion from a very pleasant, quiet, and peaceful nun.

There were several transient boats in the marina, and we met some of their crews. Just down the float from us was Quokka, an ocean racer being delivered to the Canary Islands for the trans-Atlantic Rally (ARC). She had set out before we arrived, but had returned because of the weather. A little way on our other hand was a Canadian racer, disabled with a broken mast track. And across the way was the Swan 40 Teragram, the personal boat of a mega-yacht captain. We visited back and forth with these guys, and spent many of our evenings in the marina bar with them and others.

We had fair weather coming in, but it became windy and rainy. The boats in the marina surged hard against their lines, and we under- stood why many of them had heavy stainless steel springs in their docklines. In all, we stayed a week in La Coruña, waiting for the weather to change. I busied myself with the boat, changing the engine oil and doing other maintenance chores, but Barbara took a train trip to spend a day in Santiago de Compostela, thinking it

One day we went to see the Changing of the Guard at the Capitania, a military head- quarters on its own little square. The new guard assembled itself away in a corner behind some parked cars and eventually marched in behind a game but not terribly trim band. Afterwards, we had a couple of glasses of prosecco at a very peaceful cafe on the main square, under the arcades just next to the City Hall. It made a pleasant, and rather festive, morning.

At every cafe, when one stops for a glass of wine or for a beer, it is inevitably accompanied by some little bit of food, maybe just a few peanuts and an olive, or a bit of bread and cheese, or a paper-thin slice of the local sun-dried ham. The drink is never served just by itself, and we found this a very easy custom to get used to.

We were headed south and west, however, like many of the other boats. At the end of the week, the weather cleared, and the consensus was that the sea would soon lie down. Quokka left on Saturday, but we waited until Sunday. Exactly a week after we had arrived, we slid out of the harbor and turned left, following the channel through the ledges to round Finisterre and head south along first the Spanish, then the Portuguese coast. We had intended to spend some time cruising these coasts, but delays, for weather and other reasons, ate up our margin, and we were looking at a non-stop run to Lagos, just around Cape St.Vincent on the Portuguese south coast, in the fabled Algarve.