Porto d'Ischia to Gaeta

We left Argripole in the morning and decided to get to Salerno. Salerno is a bigger city and we thought we could do some marketing, get some gas for the stove, and hide from the wind for a day or so. 

We were able to sail on a beam reach for quite a bit of the journey, though we messed up a little bit because the “island” we were looking at turned out to be the point of land we needed to go to. The low lands aren’t visible until you’re under 10 miles or so away, so we were looking at a point of land thinking it was an island. Once we did a bit of a course correction the wind was even more behind so we had a nice long sail to Salerno.

When we arrived the wind was blowing in the 20’s and there were a half-dozen race boats – a locally built 25 footer designed by Paulo Cian that looked a bit like a Melges 24 with no coach house. The rig is fairly small which is a good thing because it was windy. Anyway, it turns out that we were at the site of the Italian Match Racing Championships ... a regatta with 12 teams invited. They had a couple of days of racing followed by the semi-finals and finals on Sunday. Just watching the teams do the pre-regatta setup made me wish I could have been a part of it. Oh well, maybe we’ll have to organize something when I get home.

The mooring that we had a Salerno was very exposed. The inner harbour has 2 meters of draft and we’re 2.3 meters. 

We came in beside this new 55 foot long sailboat that had been med-moored at the inner harbour and had broken loose and was worked against the pier for a couple of hours in a storm. The damage to this new boat was ugly, the rail was pulled out for about 20 feet on the port side, the stern had a huge gash in it, the entire starboard side had road-rash – and they had a small ‘swimming pool’ filled with water on the bow to keep the stern out of the water so the boat wouldn’t sink. I asked the dockman what happened and he told us this and two other boats didn’t weather the storm 3 days before very well. I don’t know if the boat was a write-off but it had many tens of thousands of dollars of damage minimum. Note to self – when the wind is blowing 25, get to a marina with laid moorings or a safe harbour to anchor in.

We ended up staying another day at Salerno since we liked the harbour and there was lots of stuff to do. The time we sped working our way up the coast was paying off since we had the time to spend in the places that we liked.