For Maquieira, the sea stands for freedom. The school he joined exists to offer exactly that. The Adapted Sailing School is run by the Monte Real Yacht Club, whose clubhouse stands inside an old walled enclosure on the Monterreal peninsula. Lessons are free and run every day from September to June. The instructors are trained specifically in adapted sailing.
The school is led by Olaia Cabo Martinez. She has watched many students make the same crossing Maquieira made, from the wheelchair on the pontoon to the seat in the boat. What changes, she says, is the sense of freedom once they leave the chair behind and are out on the water.
The boats make this possible. The club sails the GOS16, designed by the Toledo company Fiberships and first presented at the National Hospital for Paraplegics in Toledo. Both sailors sit in shaped seats with every control within reach. More than half the boat's weight sits in its keel, with a bulb about a metre below the surface, so the boat cannot capsize. Two watertight compartments mean it cannot sink either. Fundación Repsol paid for several of the club's boats. The club designed and built its own crane to lift sailors aboard.
Over the years the school has opened its doors wider. It now also takes children with behavioural problems, older people and victims of gender violence. With ASEM Galicia, the regional association for people with neuromuscular diseases, it runs a morning course on alternate Thursdays. In 2017, for the programme's fifth year, the club opened a 60-metre accessible walkway between the clubhouse and the moorings, nearly a metre and a half wide and coated against slipping.
The cost, around 150,000 euros a year, is shared with the Galician regional government and Baiona town council. What that money pays for is harder to count.
One student cried at the sight of a starfish, the first they had ever seen. Another, halfway through a lesson, jokingly asked for someone's hand in marriage.
Maquieira keeps going back out.