Wednesday (cont) / Thursday 23 / 24 October 2019

Dawn on Wednesday morning

The hillside which burnt last night, and the rather windy river

We twiddled out thumbs for hours, waiting for the wind to die down, which it seemed not to be doing. We were running a graph showing the wind speed over time, and there was a reasonably steady wind of 15 - 25 knots blowing down the river, across our bows.  However, there were frequent gusts that were hitting 45 knots (just over 50 mph), sometimes less than a minute apart.  It was easy to see when the gusts were coming, it was textbook conditions for reading the wind on the water, especially when the surface was being lifted off by the wind. We knew that the river was shallow enough that we had to be precise with the boats position, there were lines from the bows of some of the other boats that restricted our access to the ideal channel, and we had to visit the fuel dock before going to the lifting dock. Oh, and we had flights booked for Thursday morning, so we had to find a way of getting the boat to the lifting dock, and there was work for us to do once the boat was lifted.

It being the Mediterranean, we knew that work would stop from lunch time to mid afternoon, and by the time the guys from the yard were back, the wind had dropped a little, and there were slightly longer lulls between the gusts.  We called the yard, and they sent 2 ribs to act as tugs to hold us straight. These were operated by two of the three brothers who run the boatyard.  One of them had his dog, a large Alsatian with him in the rib.  We waited for a lull, and then nosed out into the river. Getting out from between two other boats was going to be one of the trickiest parts, as the bow is blown downwind as soon as it sticks out beyond the upwind boat next to us.  Once we were clear of the other moored boats, getting to the fuel dock was relatively straightforward, and once there we were able to just position the boat parallel to the dock, and let the wind blow us in.  Having heard a tale of woes from another boat about the diesel bug growth that they had found, we topped up the tanks to leave as small a surface area as possible and added the necessary fuel treatment.

From here it was just a neat 180 degree pirouette, and we were able to reverse into the lifting dock, for the travel hoist to do its job.  As before, the guys from the yard took enormous trouble with the placement of the strops, before starting the lift.  They even lifted the boat slightly and moved it toward the shore to make it easier for us to get off.  They will complete the positioning of the boat 0n Thursday in our absence, but washed it straight away. While they were doing this, I was on board, completing all of the other final jobs, disconnecting the batteries, and putting the boat cover on.  I finished this after dark, when the boatyard guys had gone home, and about two minutes before our taxi arrived to take us to Alghero.  En route, we were treated to a spectacular lightning storm offshore. I recall something similar on the last day of our trip last year.

We stayed overnight and headed to the airport first thing in the morning and took the only flight to London today. Nothing to report about this other than an unexpectedly good service at Stansted on arrival.

We will now terminate the blog for this year and hopefully restart next year with some new adventures.

Distance covered today	0	nautical miles
Trip distance covered	549	nautical miles
Distance covered 2019	1602	nautical miles

Steve (and Tricia)