Monday 16 September 2019

Under no particular pressure of time, we got ourselves together and prepared the boat to leave. The anchor was duly raised, and we headed off to the next stopping point.  There was a pleasant wind blowing, and we were able to sail, always a bonus.

We went to a bay called Cala Portese, which is bounded at one end by a fairly narrow causeway linking what would otherwise be two separate islands. There are named separately, Isola Caprera and Isola Rossa.  There were mooring buoys laid, and we duly picked one up, although not as smoothly as we would have hoped.  Despite our efforts at fixing the “Swedish thing”, after one successful use a day or two ago, it reverted to type, and refused to perform its trick of putting a rope through the eye at the top of the buoy. Never mind, we caught the buoy with the boathook, but while trying to thread the mooring line through the eye by hand, the two halves of the boathook, separated and the useful end with the hook on it, floated away for a short time and then sank.  We resorted to the classic RYA technique of lassoing the buoy, and end attached to it properly.  Keen not to leave debris on the otherwise pristine National Park, we located the missing bit of boathook, and I was (just) able to dive down and pick it up from the seabed.  It doesn’t look repairable and it will never be the same again. I feel a new boathook coming on.

After this excitement, we settled down to be entertained by a sailing school, using some of the unoccupied buoys for circuits and bumps. They were learning to sail up to a buoy, and stop the boat so that they could attach to it. Each boat had about 4 students on board, and there were 5 or 6 boats, so at a minimum there were 24 successful attempts, countless failures and one demonstration run from each of the instructors.  One seemed to be using the bow of Equinox as a target point before the students turned up to loose speed, and it was a little disconcerting to have so many close by, and not all completely under control all of the time.  We survived unscathed. It was great to watch them learn in such a beautiful place.

So there is a use for an umbrella on a boat...

We took the dinghy ashore and had a short walk around the causeway, but there were plenty of cars coming past so it was not ideal.

Eventually, the sailing school departed and peace and tranquillity reigned.

Distance covered today	8.0	nautical miles
Trip distance covered	200.0	nautical miles
Distance covered 2019	1253.0	nautical miles
Steve (and Tricia)