Wednesday 11 September

As we turned in last night, the peace of the anchorage was disturbed by the arrival of a charter boat with a group of lads in their early 20s.  They attempted to anchor several times before finally getting the anchor to hold, fortunately they were not too close to us.  When we woke in the morning, we noted that they had moved during the night, their anchoring technique was clearly not working.  After breakfast we watched them attempt to move and relay the anchor yet again.  We have frequently come across instructions to avoid anchoring in the sea grass, we are requested to drop the anchor into sand so that the delicate marine habitat is undisturbed.  These guys were not bothering with these considerations and just going for any place they could find. They started to reverse while the anchor was still dropping, with the result that they were moving backwards at a rate even before the anchor got to the seabed, and they had no idea of what the bottom was like where the anchor ended up.  By continuing to reverse they were creating an effective plough to destroy the seabed.  I had my head in my hands watching this failing and damaging technique.  Eventually they decided to leave, much to our relief.

The wind had blown all night, but by morning is was starting to drop, a little later than forecast. We had been gently rocked which is a pleasant experience when you are confident that you aren’t being blown anywhere.

We want to move on through the Maddalenas, and had identified a nice-looking anchorage on the next island.  However, when we got there it was too full for us to be able to find a space.  There are plenty of places here, so we moved on another couple of miles to the next island. While en route, we passed a very large and expensive looking sailing yacht coming in the other direction.  It was the Rolex Maxi World Cup in Porto Cuervo last week, for the biggest sailing boats that race, and I suspect that this was one of them moving on to the next destination.

 When we arrived at the next place it was also reasonably busy, but we thought we could find a spot to anchor.  We dropped and recovered the anchor 5 or 6 times before we concluded that we could not get it to bite in a place that was a safe distance from the other boats, so eventually we gave up and headed to Palau.

While all of this was going on, I saw the best use yet for a SUP board.  A girl on one of the other yachts was using it as a sunbathing platform, away from the various shadow casting bits of the boat she was on.  However, she looked less than impressed, when her husband / boyfriend / partner decided to try to share it with her.  It was not big enough for the 2 of them.

We were greeted by friendly, helpful and competent marinaros, who led us to a space just big enough for us.  A perfect approach and mooring, and we were able to relax and enjoy the atmosphere of the port, which is the gateway from the Sardinian mainland to the Maddalena archipelago.  We will explore more tomorrow.

Distance covered today	8.0	nautical miles
Trip distance covered	172.0	nautical miles
Distance covered 2019	1225.0	nautical miles
Steve (and Tricia)