Alghero

12^th-13^thAugust - Isola Farignana, Sicily – Marina Villasimus, Sardinia (in port)

14^thAugust - Marina Villasimus – Capo Pula (anchored)

15^thAugust - Capo Pula – Marina Piccolo di Poeto, Cagliari (in port)

16^thAugust - Marina di Poeto – Capo Pula (moored , original destination Punto di Malfatano abandoned)

17^thAugust - Capu di Pula – Marina del Sole, Cagliari (in port)

18^thAugust - Marina del Sole (in port)

19^thAugust - Marina del Sole – Porto Guinco (anchored)

20^thAugust - Porto Guinco – Porto Corall (in port)

21^stAugust - Porto Corall – Arbatax (in port)

22^ndAugust - Arbatax – Isola Ruia (anchored)

23^rdAugust - Isola Ruia – Porto de la Taverna (anchored)

24^thAugust - Porto de la Taverna – Marina di Olbia , Olbia (in port)

25^thAugust - Olbia – Cala Gavetta, Isola Maddalena (in port)

26^thAugust - Cala Gavetta (in port)

27^thAugust - Cala Gavetta – Porto Liscia (anchored)

28^thAugust - Porta Liscia – Isola Rossa (in port)

29^thAugust - Isola Rossa – Cala Reale, Isola Asinara (on buoy)

30^thAugust - Cala Reale – Alghero (in port)

31^stAugust - 2^ndSeptember - Alghero (in port)

Please excuse the jumping around of the font size and type. When you cut and paste text from a word file, over-blog appears to choose the font at random and then you can't change it. Encouragement to pay for the "advanced" version I suppose.

Wednesday 29^thAugust – Cala Reale

I'm sitting on a buoy in the Cala Reale on the Isola Asinara. The buoy is hugely expensive 36 €. I have chosen to assume this includes the permission to moor in the national park. Otherwise, it's ridiculous. There is one other boat here and in good Italian style, I am moored on the buoy right next to it. I was moored on a buoy further away but the guy who came to take my money asked me to move to another as the ferry came very close as it came into the pier. In fact the ferry went out of it's way to demonstrate that this buoy had been placed too close to its path and deviated so much from it's course in the process, it practically missed the pier altogether. The first buoy he chose was right next to the pontoon and practically on the shore. I was worried that if I messed up my departure, I would end up on the rocks, especially as the forecast is for a southerly wind tomorrow. The buoy I picked was right next to the only other boat in the mooring. Serve them right.

The trip across from Sicily to Sardinia was a mixture of different weather. We started off under motor in a flat calm and stopped three times in mid sea and let the boat drift, twice to swim and once to have a shower on the swimming platform. As night fell, the wind came in from the north east as promised and we were soon under double reefed main and partly furled genoa. We stayed like that until the wind died away near midday the next day and we started the motor again. The wind got up to force 6 just around midnight and the ride was rather rough. It was hardly possible to sleep at all during the two watches from midnight to four. I stuffed myself in the corner between the bunk and the side of the boat but even so, had to sleep face down with my arms outstretched to stop being thrown from side to side. When I woke Olivier at two, he wasn't a happy sailor.

Strangely, though we had not seen a boat since just after leaving the islands, two boats came up with us just after dark and kept us close company until dawn, one under sail and the other under motor. The one under sail was less than a mile away and crept closer as the night went on. The Italian need for company manifesting itself even at sea or two boats unsure of their course needing someone to follow? In any case, they both left us around dawn, the one under motor, a biggish sloop, putting up his sails and zooming off towards the north west, and the other, a boat about our size heading off towards the south as if he was going to round the south of the island.

We went into the marina at Villasimus which is in the bay just east of Capo Carbonara though the bay provides a huge area for anchorage which is well protected from anything but a gale from the south. The marina is a bit posy. The architects having left big rocks sticking up inside it to make it more interesting and natural like. The rocks are completely surrounded by pontoons. They haven't gone so far as to leave dangers to navigation in the middle of the marina.

We went in search of a meal but were defeated a) by the two competing sound systems positioned in front of the restaurant and blaring out two discordant but otherwise indistinguishable examples of modern music and b) by being totally ignored by the waiter until we went away. Clearly we are not the kind of clients Italian head waiters like to have gracing their (otherwise practically empty in this case) restaurants. The clientèle did not strike us as being particularly upmarket and the boats were distinctly ordinary by our refined standards but there you go.

We had a day to waste before Jérôme arrived at Cagliari so we used the Vela Sardinia guide to choose a mooring and went there. We (or rather I) swithered between going south and going north. In the end we opted for south across the Golfo di Cagliaria as the anchorage seemed better protected from the south-easterly wind. By the time we got there, the south wind had turned into a north wind but you can moor both on the north and the south side of Capo Pula and the bay on the north side is deep enough that you get shelter from the north too. We moored far enough away from other boats that Olivier could satisfy his penchant for bathing without a cozzy. An Italian boat promptly came and anchored just beside us but that's Italy for you. A very friendly place. The boat moored using a novel technique which consisted of running across our bows at full speed with the wind broad on his beam, dropping the anchor and coming to a violent swinging halt just two boat lengths away. Judging by how little he swung, he must have had just enough chain out to touch the bottom but I am not criticizing other peoples anchoring techniques after the dismal show I have made of it on so many occasions.

Anchorage at Capo di Pula. Italian boat not shown for clarity.

We zoomed back to Cagliari to pick up Jérôme using the south wind which seems to blow into the Golfo di Cagliari every day. We went into the Marina Piccolo di Poeto just around the Capo Sant'Elia from Cagliari because it seemed a less industrial option than one of the marinas in Cagliari harbour itself. The marina is OK if a little expensive at 35€ but the toilets and showers are unusable. Again, we used the facilities in the boat. Jérôme turned up as we were coming back from the long and very hot trek to the supermarket. He was dressed as if for mountain climbing and made me hot just to look at him. Jérôme's sartorial style made a change to the boat where an outfit of shorts and nothing else had become de rigeur.

Jérôme shouted us to an unexpectedly expensive meal at one of the restaurants on the sea front next to the marina and I'm sure blew his entire week's budget.

Jérôme. Sartorial revolution for Westward.

We set off next day to go to an anchorage just around the corner of the southerly tip of Sardinia called Porto di Malfatano. As we passed Capo di Pula, the wind went from south east to south west and went up to about twenty knots and a nasty little chop got up. Under reefed main, we made no headway at all. After two longish tacks which took an hour, we had made less than two miles. Finishing under motor looked like a long slamming slog so we opted for a return to Capo di Pula. Before we had even got back to Capo di Pula, the southerly had died off leaving a fitful northerly and a sloppy swell. We moored right in the middle of the bay on a flat sandy bottom. We had originally tried nearer to the southern end but the bottom was a mixture of weed, rocks and mud with big fissures running across it and I was worried we would never get the anchor up again.

Old guard looks on in disdain. Bye bye Olivier. We'll miss you.

Friday 31^stAugust, Alghero (in port)

I'm in Alghero port now at what was the public wharf but is now run by something called the Consorzio Porto di Alghero. It still seems a more picturesque and probably cheaper alternative than the three or four conventional marinas which share the rest of the port.

I have just dispensed 10 hours of diesel, motoring in a nearly flat calm, to get to Alghero in time to avoid the gale which is forecast for tomorrow. The Mediterranean surpasses understanding.

We returned to Cagliari to drop off Olivier and to pick up my sister a day later. We decided to try one of the marinas in Cagliari harbour as the marina at Poeto wasn't sufficiently good to merit a second visit. We ended up in the Marina del Sole in the south east corner of Cagliari harbour.

Marina del Sole is a slightly eccentric operation. The pontoons are OK though the pendule on one side was covered with mussels and the casts of some kind of marine worm and a layer of coal black mud which was soon liberally spattered over the sides and deck of the boat. Olivier cut his hands on the shells trying to pull it in. The ormeggiatore pulled up a second pendule after first shaking off a clump of mussels as big as a football but this one was so covered in shells that it proved impossible to pull it in at all.

The marina does have toilets and showers. The showers worked rather well but the toilet was continually blocking up. The office was a cluttered desk in the corner of a building which was part shack part tent. The shack had a back room which looked like it had been stocked by an insane camping magpie. There was a fridge in the bar which we were sure would not have passed a sanitary inspection. The whole place seemed to be run and possibly owned by an old guy with a white beard who, when he was not reconnecting the garden hose which served as water supply for the toilets, was recharging the battery in his outboard by running it full tilt tied up to one of the pontoons. It is cheaper than the Poeto at 30€.

We all liked Cagliari once we had left the lower part of the old town where we were followed for several blocks by a sub-continental guy in a shalwar kameez (who may have had no more sinister aim than to try to get us to visit his shop) and climbed to the bastion. The bastion is on the seaward edge of the citadel which contains the old town. It has a tremendous view over the not very pre-possessing rest of Cagliari and the sea. There is a bar there called the Theatro Mobile which has very reasonable cocktails which are served with a selection of quite yummy entrees. The seats are either bean bags or couches for lounging on and you either sit outside under the stars or in a kind of aquarium affair with glass walls on one side and tent-like roofs. We had a cocktail and ate the entrees. We had another cocktail and ordered some food. We watched pink flamingoes flying over. Life seemed good.

Theatro Mobile on the bastion in Cagliari. Dozens of pink flamingoes flew over while we were there. No, really. Sardinia under-sells itself.

The cathedral of Cagliari is amazing. 12^thcentury originally, the interior is mostly baroque though a special kind of flamboyant renaissancy baroque. The interior is decorated in coloured marble and the alter is a marvellous piece of engineering with the stairs leading down to the level of the church supported on the backs of two couched lions. The architect must have liked the grotesque style and the interior is full of grotesque touches like little winged heads with smiling or scowling faces. The crypt is particularly ornate with the walls and barrel vault roof covered in cartouches containing images of saints. I never knew the church had made so many saints. There is a bier in the centre of the church with the body of Saint Mary on it attended by several angels. The whole thing was covered in gauze which people would lift up to touch the head of a particularly propitious angel.

The crypt in Cagliari cathedral. Every one of those little squares on the wall is the picture of a different saint (though sometimes they have several saints like : St. Saturninus is identified in the photo of St. Clothilde)

Olivier left to catch his flight back to Paris and Jérôme and I stayed on to wait for my sister Louise's arrival. We went back to see the cathedral having been chucked out last time before we had seen our fill. This time we had to wait for a wedding. When the wedding was over we ducked in and this time we stayed so long that a service started and we had to creep out of the crypt, which is underneath the alter, getting dirty looks from the priest and the organist.

Personally, I've never heard of St. Venereus. I think they were just making them up. There was another called saint Cadamus; obviously the patron saint of Computer Aided Design.

Saturday 1^stSeptember, Alghero (in port)

Looks like winter is coming. The promised mistral has brought 20° temperatures with it. This is much too cold for my African climate adjusted body.

Louise arrived and we set off up the east coast of Sardinia helped by a constant 15 to 20 knot south-easterly. The first stop was an anchorage on the east side of Capo Carbonara across the peninsula from the marina at Villasimus. The next two days, we anchored at lunchtime and went into port in the evening. One of the lunchtime anchorages showed me that my electronic map is not to be relied on to show submerged rocks in small bays. We were searching for a sandy bottom in a bay on the north side of Capo Ferraro when Jérôme shouted “il y a un grand caillou!” and the depth gauge jumped from 6m to 3m in an instant. Fast reverse and we didn't touch anything. Afterwards we verified by swimming that the grand caillou was at about 2m so we would have just scraped over it. Still, it cooled my never very warm ardour for unmarked anchorages. This all comes from not having a proper pilot for Sardinia.

Louise left at Arbatax after a much too short stay to bus back to Cagliari and we left to go on up the coast.

My beautiful sister Louise and my, if not beautiful at least striking, friend Jérôme.

We anchored the next two nights, in the process zooming past a blue grotto and “the most beautiful beach in the Mediterranean”. Jérôme grumbled a bit but it seemed a shame to me to stop with such a good wind and anyway, the blue grotto and the most beautiful beach would have been scrums of tour boats and moored pleasure boats. The second anchorage was Porto de la Taverna where the number of boats showed that we were approaching the popular cruising grounds.

Lunchtime anchorage on the east coast of Sardinia. The shadow of the boat falling across the anchor chain.

We entered Olbia harbour under genoa alone and we reached 7 knots in the fairway before we rolled the genoa up and started the motor. The wind was blowing 25 - 30 knots straight down the centre of the harbour. I called what I thought was the marina near the town but when we arrived and called on the VHF, the person on the other end said he couldn't see us. After some rather dangerous mucking around in the entrance to the claustrophobic marina surrounded by islands and shallow water which provoked no response from the marina except a guy on a boat who told us to bugger off out of there (but in Italian), we realised that the “Marina di Olbia” we had called was in fact one we had passed on the way in. We extracted ourselves with difficulty from the town marina and motored back. The “Marina di Olbia” looked brand new and expensive but it was just beside the airport and I was fed up and edgy about fiddling around in the narrow fairway with a 25 knot wind blowing so we went in.

99€. That's what a night costs at the Marina di Olbia for a 10m boat. I had planned to stay several days and get various things done while waiting out a gale warning in the comfort of a port, but at 99 euros it was not on. The marina is OK; the toilets and showers are brand new and still relatively clean. There is no free WiFi but there is a free shuttle to the airport which theoretically comes when you call it. There is a boat restaurant moored in the marina which serves tapas with your beer. There is an Auchan supermarket about a kilometre away in a shopping centre where I also got my Wind stick recharged. So in all, it's quite a good marina, but not 99 euros worth. Again, all this comes from not having a proper pilot, just a tourist map showing (it turns out) only the marinas which have paid to be on it.

I motored off in the morning leaving Jérôme on the pier. Snif.

Isola Tavolara near Porto della Taverna anchorage

The boat beside us at the marina was a slightly tatty but rather racy Italian thing with an equally racy young Italian crew and a female skipper. They didn't look like the kind of people you would meet in a hundred euro a night marina but they were picking new crew up from the airport and I guess if there are six of you, 100 euros is acceptable. The skipper showed me the best marina in the Maddalenas in which to wait out the gale. She was going the same way but was going to anchor in a bay which she reckoned was mistral proof. I would have done the same except that Wind Finder was predicting 37 knots in the gusts and I was far from sure my anchor was 37 knot proof.

I sailed up in the same strongish south-easterly on a weaving course through the islands. At once I was struck by the sheer number of boats both sailing and motor. We had only seen one or two a day since leaving Cagliari and now I was having to keep a look out on a permanent basis. The boat was tossed around by the wakes of uncaring fast motor boats tearing past at full speed a few boat lengths away. The narrow strait between Isola delle Bisce and the mainland was positively choppy with their washes.

I stayed two nights in the marina at Cala Gavetta while the mistral howled outside. There were gusts of 37 knots in the harbour. I reckon there was more outside. One of the boats next to me belonged to a couple who have been living on their boat for fifteen years. Understandably, they try not to pay for moorings if possible. They had just come from spending a week anchored in Porto Vecchio harbour but some problem with their batteries had forced them into port. They must be experts on cruising the Mediterranean on a shoe string but unfortunately I was not able to extract much concrete information from them. They seem to play it by ear and not write much down. They told me I could have tied up for nothing at the pier in Olbia and the same for Cagliari. They were a little vague as to exactly where in Cagliari port you could do this. The guy had a few rough pencil marks in his Imray guide (it turns out there is a separate Imray guide to Corsica and Sardinia) which served as aide memoires. They were looking for a port in Sardinia to winter the boat in. I passed on the information I had had about Santa Maria Navarese.

I didn't see much of the town of La Maddalena. It seemed highly touristy and not particularly attractive.

The mistral blows in the strait between Isola Maddalena and Sardinia. Note absence of oysters on rocks. All been blown off.

I had paid my anchoring fee for the Maddalena nature reserve and had intended to sail around a bit then anchor in one of the calas on Isola Razzoli or Isola Santa Maria but the sight of so many boats in the channel west of Isola Maddalena put me off. It was like Sydney Harbour on a Saturday afternoon. I went and anchored in the east end of Porto Liscia for the day and tried to catch up on my blog. The main anchorage is at the western end and is better protected but it is rather deep except just at the edges and Meteoconsult were predicting that the wind would go into the east so I anchored off the beach at the eastern end. The bottom was rather weedy and I didn't have much faith in the holding power but the wind never went over 15 knots (from the north-west) and during the night it died away to next to nothing to pick back up again in the morning (from the north-west). Clearly, predicting the wind direction in Sardinia is not easy.

In any case, the weather forecast was for two days of strong winds on Friday and Saturday and I wanted to arrive in Alghero before that in case I was stuck somewhere and missed my rendez-vous with my next crew.

Sunday 2^ndSeptember, Alghero (still in port)

I'm waiting for Ali to arrive before heading for Minorca. The weather is not good, spotty rain here and big thunderclouds out to sea. Last night I was awakened by a sound I didn't recognise; rain on the deck of the boat. I haven't had rain at all since the trip from France to Corsica and none heavy enough to patter on the deck since I left St. Cyprien. The forecast is not good for the crossing for the moment. The Tramontane is blowing in the Golfe de Lion and there are strong wind warnings for Minorca until Tuesday.

Back to the blog. My hastily marked up tourist map and the sketchy coverage given by the Corsica Pilote Cotier showed no anchorages on the north-west coast so I headed for a marina at a place called Isola Rossa. The contrast between the area around the Maddalenas and the north west coast was surprising. From the moment I rounded Punta Falcone, I didn't see a single boat until just before entering the Isola Rossa marina when a catamaran passed me going the other way. The coast is a bit featureless and has no towns or villages at all until just before Isola Rossa where there is what must be a holiday house development. The houses are exactly the colour of the rocks and are very hard to pick out from a distance. Maybe its a regulation.

Not a soul in the Golfo dell'Asinara

The exact location of the marina at Isola Rossa wasn't marked on my electronic chart or (more surprisingly) in the Corsica Pilote Cotier. The Sardinian part of this pilot is even more vague and laconic than the rest of the book and not very much use. I found the marina nestled behind the Isola Rossa just south of the point. There is a town but it is entirely touristic. Again, the marina looks brand new but the price is rather reasonable by Italian standards at 38 euros. There are perfectly acceptable showers and toilets and the beach is just over the sea wall.

As soon as I had settled the boat, I went for a swim from the rocks forming the wall of the marina. The water was a nice colour if a bit cloudy, but it had a very nasty smell. I was amazed so many people were willing to swim in it. I kept my mouth firmly shut and my eyes out of it and got out rapidly.

A boat was anchored off the beach just south of the marina. I thought he was there only for the day but he was soon joined by another boat and they both stayed the night. Another place I could have economized the price of a marina.

View from the marina at Isola Rossa. Nice beach. Horrible smelly water.

I motored straight from Isola Rossa to Asinara. This is another national park with restrictions on access by motor boats and on anchoring. They have installed buoy parks in all the anchorable bays outside the total exclusion zone. I went to the Cala Reale park which is just off the biggest settlement on the island. The buildings are partly in good repair and partly ruinous. I assume they were (and may still be) all part of some kind of quarantine establishment, at least, that is what is written on the biggest. The island has a definite Scottish highlands and islands feel with a green and purply coloration.

The wind was about 15 knots and I had some difficulty taking the buoy. I used the technique which I had imagined, backing up to the buoy and putting a rope on it from the stern. My mooring ropes are just too short to go from the bow to the stern and then to a buoy so I used one rope tied to a cleat at the stern to put first on the buoy and tied a second to a cleat at the front, then, with some difficulty did the change over from hanging by the stern from one rope to hanging from the bow from another. It was totally impossible to pull the boat up to the buoy by hand to put the second rope on; I had to use the motor. When I did the change over, I had to run to the bow and make the end of the rope fast before the weight of the boat came on the line. In 20 knots or over, the whole operation would be very tricky indeed.

It was here that the ferry demonstrated his pique by sailing as close as possible to my stern. When the guy who managed the buoy parks came out in his gommoni, he asked me to change buoys. I got him to help as some dratted innovator had tied ropes to the rings on all the buoys, except the one I was on, which floated in a long strand downwind. I was afraid if I backed up to one of these buoys that I would end up with this rope wrapped round the prop (Westward has too much freeboard to allow me to catch the rope with a boat hook reliably from the bow.)

Cala Reale on Isola Asinara looking less Scottish when you include the buildings.

Looking the other way. Note presence of Italian boat.

I slept excellently as I always do when the boat is on a buoy. I left at about 7h00 and had breakfast on route, a practice which Olivier had forbidden (well, discouraged). The distance from Asinara to Alghero was 50 miles (passing north about the island since I was too chicken to use the pass between the island and the mainland) and I motored the whole way. Just before Capo Caccia where the coast turns east into the Rada di Alghero the coast starts to get quite interesting with cliffs and islands. Just before the point is the island of Foradada which has two caves, one of which passes right through the island. At the base of the cliffs near the point is an opening which I realised must be the famous Grotto di Nettuno, a sea cave which is the local tourist attraction. There was a queue of boats waiting to get in.

Isola Foradada. A rock with a hole in it. A sure fire tourist draw. Well I took a picture didn't I?

The wind came up just as I rounded the point but I decided it was just another feint and I continued into the Rada under motor. On the way, I passed several good looking moorings in the Porto Conte from one of which appeared a boat which had been moored at the next buoy on Asinara. He headed for another anchorage, probably the Cala Galera, and I headed into Porto Alghero into the waiting arms of the Consorzio Porto di Alghero.

I spent a full day motoring in winds which varied from nothing to 10 knots in order to be in harbour to avoid two days of strong winds. I just love the Mediterranean.

Capo Caccia. Another rock with a hole in it.