Menorca to Sardinia
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Ian has now chased me around the deck long enough so its time to look at leaving. We have been in the bay of Cala Taulera, which is totally enclosed by land, for five nights, waiting for the right conditions to cross to Sardinia, a 200-mile passage.We go by dinghy into Mahon everyday to visit the web site for weather and get any messages. Everyone has been wonderful in keeping in touch and we certainly enjoy seeing how many emails we have each time.
The Mistral has nearly passed and, according to Vengeance’s theory, you look at the weather where you are going next, not where you are. The weather looks good for a Friday landfall but not so good in the middle. A day later will give us very little wind but this is the Med. We decide we need some wind and feel we should leave on the back of this front.
Thursday the 9th, 7.30 in the morning, the bay is flat calm, the forecast looks good, so we decide to poke our nose out the entrance. A 2.5 metre swell welcomes us, but not ones for going back; we sail on with winds of 15 knots. With the swell on our port quarter it was not too uncomfortable.
Freshening all the time and hitting speeds of 11 - 12 knots, we shorten sail and by the time it reached 40 knots, we are down to two reefs in the main and no headsail, as it was necessary to slow the boat down in the big following sea.
Waves as big as I ever want to see are breaking; some over us, but under auto pilot, the boat handled the whole situation very well and was still quite comfortable. Ian now in his element, is sailing single-handed and doesn’t have to leave the cockpit once, finding the single line reefing very easy to use.
Once on my watch in full moonlight, I went up to look around, only to see a big wave roaring down on the boat, so big, I just ran back below too scared to look.
Ian said the trip could take up to 36 hours, but at 6am I spotted the lighthouse of Capo Caccia 20 miles away. In 24 hours we covered 180 miles averaging 7.5 knots. From anchor to anchor, to Alghero on the west coast of Sardinia, we covered 200 miles in 27 hours.
We were very happy about the performance of the yacht and certainly had a quick trip.
Alghero - Sardinia is fabulous and already we love Italy. One night in Port with its old walled town, cobble streets, Spanish flavour and of course, the great designer shopping was a fantastic contrast to the night before.
The weather is now back to summer, with beautiful days, so we explore the bays of white sand, which are very much unspoilt. We anchor in the Bay of Porto Conte, a beautiful big bay that is sheltered in all conditions, and visit the caves of Neptune’s Grotto, a huge attraction here. We descend 654 stairs down a cliff face to get to them, and it was certainly worth the effort.
We motored up the west coast and around through the narrow and shallow Fornelli Passage to the small fishing village of Stintino and achieved our first 1000 miles since leaving Cadiz in August.
SMS is a wonderful tool. Our friend Luca, an Italian yachting photographer and journalist, who spends a lot of time in Australia and New Zealand with his Swan 48, was able to text us all his local knowledge.
Today we are celebrating Ian’is birthday in Bonifacio Corsica only a 10-mile sail from Santa Teresa Sardinia.
We return to Sardinia next week to meet up with our daughter Janey and her friend Dara.