Up the Corsican Coast to Golfe de Pinarellu

So far in Sardinia, we have been holed up against the wind for 4 of the 7 days we've been here ... hmmmm. Two at La Maddelena and then we moved up the Corsican coast to get away from a 40 knot gale blowing through on Sunday. We had tried to get into the marina at Porto Vecchio but either my French wasn't good enough or there just wasn't any room at the inn. Anyway, we chose a 2 step voyage -- the first to have an afternoon in a beautiful swimming harbour called Rondinara -- the second to get to a safe anchorage a little further away from the storm centre, called Golfe de Pinarellu. Even 20 miles can have you escape 10 knots or so of wind -- 20 knots is comfortable at anchor, 30 knots not so much. Remember that wind strength increases at the square of its speed -- so 20 knots is 4x stronger than 10, and 30 is double the force of 20 and 9x that of a 10 knot breeze.

The water was soooo clear!

(Marina): Rondinara was amazing! I had chosen this bay as the "book" said "...an exquisitely beautiful bay...the water is so clear...", we had to see it for ourselves. True enough it was perfect, except the water was a little cooler than normal. Here are a few pics of our time in Rondinara on the way up (more to come on the way back).

Matt doing his laundry...no maid services on Tara.

The "would be maids" supervising the drying of the laundry. Matt doing the grandad-inspired "high pants" for the girls' amusement.

Life is so stressful....

The anchor chain you see on the bottom is over 5 meters down.

A "floaty toy" blew off the beach and we captured it...
finders keepers! 

As mentioned by Matt, we were running north from a system with a lot of wind so we made our way to Pinarellu and dropped the hook. (Back to Matt):
 Things were going swimmingly. We saw another Canadian boat, turns out it is from RVYC too -- they bought a First 47.7 in England now called Faem and they are planning on leaving the boat in Roma after the summer. Unfortunately by the time we had dinner made (me and Marina on dinner duty together) it was getting really late -- plus it was the first time in a long time that the kids weren't glued to technology. Hurray for small miracles.

Playing on beach at Pinarellu

New toy discovery...

The big wind was supposed to come in the morning and right on schedule at 9am we started to get the first big gusts of 20 knots, then 25, then close to 30. Meanwhile, another blue Beneteau First -- this one a 40.7 started dragging its anchor and eventually we were fending it off Tara with our biggest fenders.

It's dragging...

Their crew was ashore (the dad, alone with his kids, had put the kids on a surfboard and swam ashore). They were finally returning later in the day, but by the time they were close to the boat we had already decided to move, and had done so.

Marina at the ready with a big fender.

A Beneteau First is its racing class and they're not as well equipped for cruising -- that 40 footer doesn't have a windlass -- and he has about 15 meters of chain attached to a rope -- so when the wind hit 30 he was dragging and "sailing" at anchor. Tara, on the other hand carries 70+ meters of 3/4 inch chain and we aren't afraid to use it.

THIS is a little close!

We had 40+ meters out or about a metric ton of it and our 75 pound anchor -- so we weren't moving. Anyway, after watching him nearly hit Tara for about an hour we decided to lift anchor and reset. Thinking about the guy with 3 kids on board hand-lifting the anchor up in a 25 knot breeze makes me want to be as far away from him as humanly possible.

Hayden and Matt making sure he didn't hit us...
he would have without the fender there.

It took two tries to get our anchor to set but set well it did, then we let out 50 meters of chain in less than 5 meters of water so we felt pretty safe. I dove the anchor and it couldn't have been more perfectly set with 30-40 meters on the ground in clear sand, with the last 10-15 meters springing the boat off the bottom.

At around 7pm the guy in the blue boat hauled up anchor -- with a 7 year old kid at the helm (OMG!) who belted it in forward while the dad reefed the chain in by hand. The first attempt failed because the kid never took it out of gear so they were dragging the anchor forward at around 5 knots -- hard on the paint. The next try he pulled up the anchor -- 22 pulls or I'd guess around 20 meters, no rope. Then the bugger went back to his original spot and dropped the anchor again, put his 3 kids on the surfboard and started back to shore -- basically undoing the up, down, up, down of our anchor that we had spent the last couple of hours worrying about. They say God loves fools and drunks ... so while he was loving the blue-boat fool, we decided to drink some wine and have God love us too.

Cocktail hour...best part of the day!

At around 3 in the morning the wind stopped and then we were treated to an hour or so of lumpy slop where the boat rolled around a bit -- then at around 5am just before dawn the wind shifted 180 degrees and we were facing the waves -- a much more comfortable spot, and our friend in the blue boat had dragged quite a distance that night and was now a couple hundred meters away.

Evening Photos:

At around 8am we sparked up the engine and decided to head down to Rondinara again, starting our journey southward toward Sardinia and eventually Sicily. There was a reasonably nice wind and we pulled out our sails and headed down the coast. Since Pinarellu is only 8-10 miles away from Porto Vecchio we decided that we would visit the port and all go ashore to check out the old walled city and also provision up for the next couple of days.