12th July - Portoscuso, Sardinia

Soundtrack: Abba’s Dancing Queen, performed by six dancers in gold lame jumpsuits and black stiletto boots against the backdrop of Portoscuso harbour. We’re at an open air concert enjoying an ice-cream and the parade of passersby. We’ve just made friends with an adorably feisty pug puppy.

High Point: Getting to Sardinia. To celebrate we join the Saturday evening crowd to eat pizza in a makeshift restaurant in the street, washing the meal down with a large carafe of chilled red wine.

Low Point: A long and lumpy passage to Sardinia. In Mahon we wound up with 18 pages of weather forecasts off the internet and decide to sail on Thursday, despite strong northwesterlies forecast for west of Corsica and north Sardinia. We reckoned we’d avoid the worst of it some 100 miles further south, but we’d not twigged that the swell might reach us.

It is 193 miles on the GPS from Mahon to the southwest corner of Sardinia, nearly 48 hours passage at our rate of progress. We upped anchor from Mahon mid-morning on Thursday and in the expected NE3-4, we cracked off south of our course to keep the boat comfortably at 60 degrees off the wind. It was rough, but OK. On cue the wind backed NW later in the day but died away in the evening, leaving us to motor through the night. We had to hand steer as the tillerpilot was struggling to cope with the confused sea.

In the morning a breeze on the port quarter allowed us to get along under sail. Leighton gave some emergency TLC to Harry (the Aries windvane) as he’s developed a nasty habit of tracking us up to windward. We saw a number of dolphins, a turtle swimming along the surface with one flipper in the air, and once in a while a sleek, fat fish jumped out of the water – they looked like they were tuna. An open speedboat powered by a single outboard came past us some 100 miles out, giving us grounds for speculation. What was he doing out there? He stopped ahead of us and it looked like he had a rendezvous with an approaching ship, as he waited until it had passed, then sped off again. Did we witness a drugs drop? We don’t know.

Just after lunch on the second day, the northwesterly increased and with it came a short steep swell with breaking waves on the crests. Although the wind was no more than 15-20 knots apparent, the seastate made you think it was much stronger. At no time was the boat pressed with one reef in the main and the yankee part rolled, but it was a constant effort to avoid being thrown around. The conditions stayed with us as we closed the Sardinian coast the second night some 10 miles north of our track because of Harry’s slack steering. We waited until first light to gybe and had a rollercoaster last two hours surfing down the swell towards the gap between mainland Sardinia and Isla de S.Pietro. A combination of wind and swell pushing us onto an unfamiliar coast after two days at sea is an experience we could have done without, and we were pleased to get into calmer water and tie up here in Portoscuso marina.

The occupants of the neighbouring berth showed real respect for what we had done, as they (along with many other boats we’ve met) had waited until calm weather and motored the whole way across. Our new friends Alan and Ann in Sula-Mac were pleased to hear we got in safe and sound as well. Travelling some 12 hours ahead of us they had experienced a few hours of the same conditions and were concerned about how we’d be faring.

A bit like childbirth, in the relief that it’s all over you start to forget about the times when the experience was ghastly. As we stroll around the town, still rolling from the swell, we start to take in that we really are in Italy. Portoscuso is an unpretentious and pleasant place, slightly down at heel and dusty. Fishing boats moored in the harbour, drivers blasting their horns in the narrow streets, a group of men gesticulating at one another, a noisy wedding party gathered outside the municipio, shops selling olive bread, basil, gelati. It’s terra firma, and it’s heaven to be here.