Elba -- at anchor again.

At anchor in Elba

Most of us have heard of Elba – it’s the island that Napoleon was exiled to. Other than that I kind of knew it was off the Italian coast and somewhere around Corsica. I had been up late the night before working so after about two hours of sailing I went to have a nap – during this time Marina decided that we should go to a place called Porto Azzura – on the east coast of Elba. It has a nice town and looked like a pretty good anchorage.

The wind was up and we were sailng along all powered up. I had done a bunch of work in the morning that I needed to email and wouldn’t you know that the darn internet stick wouldn’t pick up a signal. Ross had wanted to slow down and go swimming and I kept putting him off and putting him off thinking I could send the email at 5 miles out and then the stress would be over. 

The dock in town

Wrong. We didn’t pick up a decent signal until less than a half mile from Porto Azzura – so I was late with my work, Ross was bummed about not going swimming so we anchored and was pretty unhappy that we had wasted the day. We tried reasoning with him but we did ruin his day and we were all hungry too.

So, I had my conference call and at around 1am Ross and I had a chat and got on the same page again. I sat up a little longer thinking about how we could make the swimming more fun and came up with using the spinnaker pole. You might remember that Ross has been trying out a release-under-load shackle to drop off the side of the boat from the spinnaker halyard. The big limiter is that the higher you are the more likely you are to fall into the boat (apparently much harder on you when compared with falling into water). Here was the idea – you hold the spinnaker halyard outboard with the spinnaker pole and drop from there … so set it up. 

Before release....

We needed to attach a snatch block to lead the halyard through because there was too much friction to raise Ross up. Once that was done we did a progressively higher and higher drop until Ross was about 7 or 8 meters off the water before he tripped the shackle … he was delighted and it was great to see the kids swimming again.

Jessie bought a hat!