Thursday 12 September

Palau is a busy little port. It is the tourist gateway to the Maddelanas, and therefore has car and passenger ferries running backwards and forwards all day.  The main Maddalena island is only a couple of miles away. There are also copious tourist boats, some self-drive ribs and charter boats, and other skippered boats that will take you to the islands for the day.  As we walk along the quayside we are regularly approached by people trying to sell some sort of trip.  The local hotels bus people in for days out on the water as well, so in the morning and especially in the early evening the port is buzzing with activity. Having said all of that, the marinaros are fantastic, rushing to direct the visiting boats, and being on hand to help everybody as they come in. It is port theatre at its best.

We visited the marina office and have booked in for 3 nights, Teresa is returning home tomorrow and this seems like a good place to get back to Olbia from. After this we explored the town, looking for all of the essential support facilities that we have to use when possible.  The various short cuts involve walking across the unprotected railway lines, but we were assured that there were only about 2 trains per day, so the chance of coinciding with one of them seem very remote.

We went out for a very good meal in the evening to celebrate Teresa’s last night with us, she is still nursing some heavy bruising from her accident earlier in the week, and has to move fairly gingerly.

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Overnight last night we had a jolly Polish family parked next to us, but they departed this morning, heading for Olbia. They were replaced by a rather more dour German speaking group, who we think were predominantly Austrian.  There were five couples but they did not all seem to do everything together as a group. Well, at least not until we returned from the restaurant.  They were sitting in the cockpit chatting away, and we were quietly enjoying the mid / late evening, when one of them produce some sheets of paper, which were distributed around their group.  They then proceeded to sing(?) some folk songs. It was excruciating! There seemed to be no recognisable tune and none of them had any sort of voice. As we cleared up our gear to retire below deck, one of them commented “Don’t you like the music?” It was almost too tempting to say that we did like music, but we hadn’t heard any recently.  We were just polite enough to make no comment.  They went on for a while, sounding like cats being strangled, but stopped just before I was going back on deck to ask them to shut up.  I hate to be a killjoy, but this was completely unreasonable at about 11:00 in the evening, when there were boats of people trying to sleep nearby. 

Distance covered today	0.0	nautical miles
Trip distance covered	172.0	nautical miles
Distance covered 2019	1225.0	nautical miles
Steve (and Tricia)