Fu10 The Galician Night Crawling Work __full__ -

Title: FU10: The Galician Night Crawling Work
Date: Sometime after midnight, somewhere between A Coruña and the Atlantic.

There’s a phrase you won’t find in any textbook: “FU10.”
It’s not a bus route. It’s not a chemical compound.
In Galicia, the damp, green claw of Spain that hangs above Portugal, FU10 is what the night workers whisper when the wind carries the smell of eucalyptus and low tide.

The Crawl begins at 22:00.

The traballo de arrastre nocturno — night crawling work — doesn’t wait for sunset. It stalks it. I first heard of FU10 from a percebeiro (goose barnacle harvester) with hands like cracked rock. He wouldn’t explain the acronym. “If I tell you,” he said, lighting a cheap Ducados, “you’d have to crawl with us.”

So I did.

What is FU10?
After three nights, I think it stands for Fondo Úmido 10 — Wet Floor 10. Or maybe Faro Urgente 10 (Lighthouse Urgent 10). Or nothing at all. The work is real enough:

• Midnight: Sorting octopus by touch in the dark. No headlamps allowed — the light scares the prey.
• 02:00: Carrying mesh bags of nécoras (velvet crabs) up wet granite stairs carved by Romans.
• 04:00: Listening to the meigas (witches) — the old women who mend nets by candlelight and tell you which coves are cursed.

The Crawling Rule
You never stand straight. Bent back, knees soft, eyes on the ground. The ground in Galicia is slick with rain, diesel, and the ghosts of shipwrecks. FU10 is the posture of survival. One upright tourist with a shiny jacket ruins the whole tide.

Why do it?
Money? A little. But the real wage is seeing the lume de Baco — the strange phosphorescent plankton that lights up when you drag a net at 3 AM. It looks like someone shook a jar of fallen stars under the water.

One veteran told me: “FU10 isn’t a job. It’s the night remembering that humans used to be nocturnal. We crawl so the day people can eat percebes and pretend they don’t have blood under their nails.” fu10 the galician night crawling work

If you ever find yourself in Ribeira or Cedeira and a local asks if you know FU10 — say no. Unless you’re ready to work until your back forgets how to straighten, drink orujo from a plastic bottle at dawn, and watch the Atlantic swallow the last hour of darkness.

Final note: Don’t look for FU10 on Google Maps. It doesn’t exist there. It lives in the calluses of Galicia’s night crawlers. And now, in this post.

Bo camiño — good crawling.

— A guest of the night tide 🌙🦀

2.1 The Kit

The modern FU10 worker—or gateador (crawler)—carries no headlamp that emits white light. Instead, they use red or green LEDs, which are less visible from distant highways. Essential gear includes:

• Knee pads made from recycled tire rubber (to silence clinking against quartz).
• A pica de bolso (pocket pick): a 15cm titanium blade for gently levering stones.
• GPS-denied navigation: a pre-plotted string compass, because Galician hills often block satellites.
• Thermal foil blanket: body heat can give away a position to thermal drones used by looters.

2. The Rías Baixas Paradox

The Rías (drowned valleys) are stunning, but they are acoustic traps. Sound travels strangely at night. For FU10 workers scanning live feeds from the network of Puertos del Estado buoy arrays, the distortion is a feature, not a bug. The work involves filtering "ghost echoes"—sonar reflections from submerged Roman ruins, sunken U-Boats from WWII, and abandoned bateeiros (mussel rafts)—to determine what is real and what is a decoy.

4. Themes & Interpretations

4.2 Negotiating Presence & Absence

The project makes visible the invisible: low‑frequency vibrations of the earth, the faint echo of a shepherd’s gaita, the scent of damp moss. By translating these into audible and visual cues, FU10 foregrounds what is usually absent from our perception, prompting a re‑evaluation of what counts as “presence” in a landscape.