Orcas you say?

The decision was made to weigh anchor at Dawn. It was a beautiful morning with a good smattering of mist to land and clear seaward. The wind was light and the sea was smooth. Our intended destination today was Vigo, meaning that we'd be firmly out of the Bay of Biscay . We were also conscious that we were now firmly in Orca territory, and a quick look on Orcas.PT showed that there had been some activity fairly recently. This was more of concern to Steph than it was to me. Since my concerns were more mechanically based. Over the last few weeks, we've been having all manner of problems due to diesel bug. And this stage I think, stress I think that we have the problem sorted. But I have thought this before that my confidence was not that high. A rolly sea has the ability to find all sorts of nastiness in the bottom of one's fuel tank. This passage would be a test. Even this wasn't the real worry, but the proximity to land that we were going to try and keep meant that we would be on a Leeshore with little or no wind and potentially no means of extracting ourselves.

We headed off and ended up in an informal buddy boat situation with a brand-new catamaran called Dinora that was also heading our way. Dinora appeared to be a real hodge podge of identities, A Jamaican flagged vessel with Spanish, English and South African crew. Motoring out of A Coruna with the sails up stability was a fairly bog standard affair and on the AIS there are a number of other boats around us heading in the same direction. Im always set more relaxed when I see that worst case we’ve all made teh same error by heading off at this time. Exactly 3 hours in, Securité Securité Securité, a 35 foot sailboat full of bright young things had spotted Orcas right next to them. It appeared that hese Orcas hung around for a little while and that the crew were able to take plenty of photos and video for the relevant authorities. Naturally, they appeared quite shook up by the whole thing. We were at this stage 1.35 miles ahead of them and in water that's according to most is the kind of depth that orcas love to play around in. We had spotted a very narrow rocky and shallow piece of water to the windward side of a small island called Sisarga. Hesitantly, we opted for that gap.
And wouldn't you know it at exactly the time that we were heading for this gap the fog roll rolled in. A full Pea-souper.
I did feel at this stage that we were in the middle of a Doctor reason’s Swiss cheese model.
I was already concerned about the engine, so was trying to keep safe distance, which we now could not do. Orca had made themselves known astern of us and a very narrow passage ahead. The fog rolling in did a little to help things. One should notice that I'm writing this after the fact and therefore all ended up okay.

The rest of this passage was relatively uneventful with the fog coming and going in visibility at worst being 50 m and finally clearing as we came towards a shortened passage for the day. I opted to cut short our journey and head to Camarina. 
It's often frustrating to cut short a passage, especially when conditions start to improve at the very end and one might well think to carry on. However it was felt that enough excitement was had for one day and so it was.