Passage to Corsica

July 5th morning started pretty early at 4:30am. We (Marina and I) woke up, made some tea, put away the last of the dishes from the previous night and went on deck. The moon was full but the sun was an hour away. At around 5:05 we had the anchor lifted and were powering out of Hyeres.

Sunrise

After crossing with a local merchant vessel heading out to Isles Parquerolles, we went out the gap in the islands and turned left onto our course of around 105 degrees heading for Corsica. With about a 4 knot tail-wind we had to power ... 2800 revs but the boatspeed was a disappointing 7.1 knots. Uh-oh, adverse current of one knot could extend our trip two hours and our arrival 'till after dark. Oh well, you can only deal with what you can deal with.

At about 7:30 Marina said she'd had enough and wanted a nap -- so she climbed in with Jess in one of the forward cabins .. much quieter under power than the aft cabins that straddle the engine compartment. Otto (the autopilot) and I carried on by ourselves until 10:30 when Marina and the kids woke up and came up top. The day started with cloud and slight sprinkles but by the time 10:30 rolled around there was nothing but sunshine all around. Starting to fry we put our bimini up (the sun cover that protects the cockpit) to protect us from the Mediterranean sun.

We have a routine every hour we're on a passage to check whether we have a leak in several compartments (something that came in mighty handy when we were taking on water from the stern compartment on our trip from Israel to Turkey), check the AIS, and put a position check on paper so that we can make an accurate distress call in the event that we run into trouble.

At around 11 am I went down for a ziz as the boat powered along -- this time in favourable current doing 8.5 knots -- life has a funny way of evening itself out -- and I settled into Jess' forward cabin because Ross was still asleep in his. At around 12:15 Hayden came down knocking on the doors so we ran up to see a whale. We weren't sure what type of whale so we need to do some research, but I think it might have been a Sperm whale -- very small dorsal fin, quite dark with no mottling or barnacles on it.

Whale sighting!

Other than passing another boat in super slow motion .. he's a mile ahead ... half an hour later -- he's half a mile a head, another hour goes by -- we're closing within a few hundred yards -- another hour .... you get the point.

At 14:00 hours after several successive 8+ knot hours underway, we were ahead of schedule so we took a 15 minute swim break, slowed down the boat, put a long line out the back and jumped off the boat and streamed out the back.

Along the way fun!

More along the way fun!

We sighted Corsica around 6pm and around 6:30 enough wind came up to sail -- at least for a while. We pulled into a bay called Galeria around 8pm and dropped the anchor. Since I forgot the new depth-sounder at home (coming later this week with Chelsea), we are without ... so coming into anchorages is a bit more tentative than usual. Not wanting to pile a 15 tonne boat onto the sand or rocks is quite an incentive to go slow and make our way gingerly. We anchored in about 7 meters of water -- we know this because we were throwing down a line to measure depth just like they did in Captain Vancouver's day, and dropped about 40 meters of chain to keep us secure.

The France and Corsica Courtesy Flags

Jessie did a great job on dinner, making aglio and olio (garlic & olive oil) gnocchi with about the garlic-iest salad on earth to accompany it. We were definitely safe from vampires that night.