L's Diary

Saturday 16th - 27th August
Today was our Corsica crossing ! Very uncomfortable ride although it did ease up somewhat on the Corsican side. Arrived at 7 am and after trying to rouse Calvi harbourmaster decided to attached ourselves to a buoy ourselves. Big mistake !!! Took us several tries and a lot of bad language before we worked out that we had to get the dingy involved. Managed to attach Rosa to the buoy after an hour. Went ashore to suss out Calvi. Small town made over to the tourist industry together with an actual Foreign Legion post up the hill.

My birthday! We had planned to hire a car for the day to explore the island but could not find one available until midday. The mountain roads are hair raising very windy, narrow but with fantastic views

Moved on down the island and after christening the new spinnaker found a lovely cove at Girolate. Decided to go to a local outdoor film show up the hill in the evening. Found out it was a live televised nocturnal dive. OK for the first 1/2 hour but after 2 hours of not much on screen and rapid french commentary I dozed off and Dave slept complete with snoring. After it finally finished at midnight the audience with I suspect relief, departed.

Nice sail stopped for lunch in Ance de Cacali then ended up in Porta Pollo for the night after cadging a mooring in 17 knot winds ! Lovely little harbour stopped for 2 nights Treated ourselves to a Pizza for dinner. Lots of small restaurants, stalls selling fruit and veg and an internet cafe so we could catch up on all those important e-mails. Included in the village was an excellent bakery. Spent the Friday cycling up to Filitosa. An area where menhirs in abundance dating from the stone age times plus small museum. all tastefully done. Managed to cycling 20 km there and back surprisingly well. Dave had to stop on the way back due to “ numb bum syndrome!

Saturday 23rd August
Very rolly sail as big swell due to bad weather up north reaching down to us. Ended up anchoring in Tizzano Not a lot of room as shallow bay mostly taken up with local small boat moorings.
Small yacht tried to moor nearby so Dave shot out to warn them we were moored in only 0.8 metres depth! Never follow a Southerly!
Arrived in Bonifaccio, a busy harbour with a distinct Italian feel to it. Had a fort on the hill with a long climb up to it but the views at the top was worth it!
The following day sailed round to Ile Lavezzi an large bay surrounded by rock, water totally clear with abundant marine life ( for the Med !) put on snorkels and went for a look. The location was so idyllic we stayed for a couple of days just enjoying swimming in warm water and sunbathing before the sail over to Sardinia.

North East sardinia

Sardinia did not start well. We needed to re-fuel, get supplies and get a permit before exploring the National park of La Madelena archipelago. Nearly all the marinas in the area are very expensive – charge band 5. Two (Palau and La Madelena town) stood out as being only 1-3. We chose the second and as expected it was a noisy grubby port with ferries, fishing boats and lambrettas everywhere. What we didn’t expect was a charge of €54 for the night. That’s more than twice the rent on our 3 bedroom house in England and all we get for it is a small patch of grubby diesel-polluted water and a dilapidated 3 yards of pontoon. We have to provide the accommodation ourselves! We felt seriously ripped off which spoiled our whole time in the town.
The town itself is heaving with tourists and tourist shops but also has most shops you could need – fish mongers, butchers, grocers, supermarkets, chandlers, etc. You have to watch the prices – particularly in bars – but by no means everywhere is a rip-off or a tourist trap. We got given the run-around for a permit but in the end a travel agent to the right of the church produced one. Two weeks for our 10.5M boat with 30% discount for a sailing boat was €91. Pretty good value as it allows you to navigate in the park and gives you free mooring buoys or anchorage in all permitted spots.



We were pleased to get away from the port and off into the park. I had a really nice days sailing – winding in and out of bays and channels and not just setting the sails for a continuous long passage. We anchored in Cala Portuese at 1600 to wait until the power boats duly went home and left mooring bouys free. When the park officials came round to collect money, I was able to get clarification on the regulations. If you read them, it implies that you can stay overnight on a buoy but NOT at anchor. The nice man in a rib explained that technically that is true but in practice the regulations are interpreted ‘reasonably’ so if you can’t take a buoy because they’re all full or there aren’t any, you can stay overnight at anchor.
We liked it so much that we stayed all next day and set off on Sunday morning. The only slight fly in teh ointment was an extremely noisy Italian family in a 50ft yacht next to us. They had a little monster called Favio (about 6 years old) who had a huge voice and spent all day either wailing, summoning Mama or prancing on the deck shouting gibberish at the seagulls for no apparent reason. If it wasn’t him, they were either playing loud music or running the engine. Great neighbours!

Forget about all those spam e-mails you get. How’s this for a pεnιs extender!

On Sunday we set off at 10.00 after breakfast and had a really nice sail in 7 to 9 Knot wind to Porto Cervo. The scenery on the way, particularly Capo Ferro is beautiful.

This is the “Costa Smeralda” – the haunt of the rich and famous. Even a mooring buoy costs €250 and if you have to ask how much a pontoon mooring is, you can’t afford it.

Rod Heikel's excellent Pilot talks of a large free anchoring area but sadly this is no more. There are now serried ranks of laid visitors moorings at extortionate prices filling most of the space. There is still room for a few shallower draft yachts inshore of the laid moorings and also to the west. Once anchored, you can take the dinghy to outside the root of the mole by the yacht club or over the harbour to Porto Veccio where the inside end of the west side of the pontoon is free dinghy mooring. Nobody bothers you as you dump your rubbish in their bins ar use their free ferry between Porto Veccio and the yacht club.

After Porto Chervo we stopped at Cala di Volpe - a beautiful bay with great anchoring and swimming but marred by high speed tenders and water skiers who rush about from morning to night.

We then anchored just behind Cape Figari in a lovely little spot. I finally saw a mother and baby dolphin and got some good photos.

And then to Olbia. It was surprisingly difficult and expensive to moor at the yacht club - although it was very friendly after you got past the rather power crased dock manager. We picked up Robin and Maggie from the airport and are going two take a 2 week holiday back through the straight (and also a two week holiday from blogging).

See you all when we resume our trip from Olbia down Sardinia in the second half of September.

Porto Pollo to Bonefaccio (including Filitosa)

Porto Pollo is lovely. It has good shelter, plenty of reasonably priced mooring buoys, most supplies from small and very reasonable shops and a really nice cafe with free internet called ‘les Oliviers’. We spent a happy two night here and will come back again if we’re in this neck of the woods again.


We took our bikes out and cycled to Filitosa 15Km away – flat all but the last 2 K. It was really worth seeing! The site has been used from at least 4000BC until well into the second millennium. The menhirs aren’t huge like Stonehenge (they mostly weigh just under a ton) but they are sculptured with clearly recognisable faces and anatomical features. They are some of the earliest sculptures in the world. The site is beautifully preserved, uncrowded and with lovely atmospheric music composed especially for them. There is an excellent English commentary and guide book to explain it.
The bike ride back was hot sweaty and tiring – showing us how unfit we are. A cold beer in a cafe overlooking the beach in Porto Pollo was nectar.
All the way down western Corsica we had been very lucky with the weather and we didn’t want to push our luck in this tricky bit of sea. Bad winds weren’t forecast for us, but a storm to the west was kicking up a big 3M swell so we cracked on round the corner onto the south facing coast the next day so that the bays would shelter us from the westerly swell.
The first place we stopped at was a tiny and very shallow inlet called Tizzano. Shelter and holding in the outer harbour were mediocre at best so we put up our keel and went in past the mole into the inner harbour – just charted as <1M. There were mixed reefs and sand but nothing less than 0.8M so we anchored and settled down to enjoy the evening. Half an hour later, a small Juneau came in with six young people on board, and seeing us assumed they could anchor too and bowled in. As soon as I realised what they were doing, I shouted in halting French to tell them we only draw 0.7M. I’m not sure they understood but they slowed down to see what all the shouting was about – and hit one of the reefs gently. Luckily they were able to retrace their path and anchor in the bay. Just goes to prove the well known saying “Never follow a Southerly”.


It just shows how jaded you get: The next anchorage “Cala Roccapina” was in a rocky cove with a white beach and warm turquoise water and we just thought of it as “OK”. In England it would have been completely stunning! It was a bit lumpy with the strong SW swell still with us and just creeping round the corner. With the wind not being of the cause of the swell it was in a different direction so we were often sideways to the swell and got rolled around a bit. A second anchor to keep us head on to it would have contributed a lot to our comfort overnight. Another lesson learned!
Next day the swell had gone and we had a gentle tail wind down to Boneffacio. We broke out the Spinaker again which drove us along at 4Knots with a 7 Knot tail wind. Very satisfying!


Bonefaccio is lovely. Set in heavily weathered chalk cliffs (the only place in Corsica we saw that wasn’t granite). The harbour is in a deep ravine and completely safe if you don’t count the continuous stream of high speed tripper boats and the huge super yachts going in and out. The charges were very reasonable (€25 per night for us). There are loads of restaurants, launderettes, supermarkets and a few other shops on the East side of the quay and an excellent chandler and sailmaker on the other side (easy to miss if you don’t know he’s there).
The old town is high up on the headland surrounded by the huge walls and bastions of the Citadel. Well worth toiling up the hill to see. Restaurant prices and other prices are also better up there than by the harbour.



Next day we set off for Isle Lavezzi. This is a completely uninhabited island at the south eastern tip of Corsica. We got a place in the best anchorage and once the ribs and power boats went in the evening, moved and set the stern anchor to keep us pointed towards the entrance in case of swell or wash. The surroundings are stunning. Completely clear blue water surrounded by rocks sculpted and smoothed into amazing shapes. Despite being right in the straights of Bonefaccio, we had lovely calm weather. It was so glorious that we stayed a second night.
And then it was off to La Madelena in Sardinia.....

West Corsica

We sailed down the western side of Corsica from Calvi to Porto Pollo. There are very few places on this coast that provide shelter from severe weather and don’t cost an arm and a leg to moor. All the marinas are charge band 5 or 6 (over €50 per night for us) and in any case seem to be booked solid days in advance in August. We had the good luck to get a weeks window of calm weather so we have moved fairly quickly – doing about 30 Miles per day. We took a buoy at Calvi (€25), fore-and-aft moored at Girolata (€16), anchored at Sagone (free) and moored at Porto Pollo (€13). So it is possible to sail this coast at reasonable cost. If a strong Westerly or South Westerly (libeccio) had come in, things would have been different and we could have been in considerable difficulty.


The scenery is spectacular! We hired a car for a day after arriving at Calvi and drove to Corte via spectacular mountain roads. Corte was the capital of Corsica in its only short period of independence in the 18th Century after throwing out the Genoese and before the French and the British got stuck in. Evidence of the Corsican struggle for independence is still visible as most road signs are bi-lingual with French first and Corsican underneath. Many of the French parts have bullet holes in them!




The first leg of the voyage was to Girolata via the La Scandola National Park. The coastal scenery is stunning with red and grey cliffs falling into the clear blue water. There are lots of lunch time anchorages but in the park itself, over-nighting, fishing and even swimming are forbidden – not that the locals seem to take much notice of the ban on swimming! With the mountains so close, there is a probability of katabatic winds so we decided to play safe and moor rather than anchor at Girolata.

Girolata is only accessible by sea. The fore-and-aft mooring worked very well and the staff come out in ribs to take the lines so it was also stress free. It was a very pretty and friendly place with surprisingly good restarants, bars and even shops right by the harbour.
The national park put on a ‘diving projection’ in the evening. We didn’t know what it was so we decided to go see. In the event, it was a live projection of people diving – with a rapid commentary (in French of course) on what they were showing us. An amazing piece of technology. I found it very interesting as I could just catch the gist of what he was saying. Poor Lindsay didn’t have a hope though so was rapidly bored out of her mind! Before the show started they showed some quirky cartoons about aliens called Shadocks – very amusing – a bit reminiscent of the clangers but with no soup dragon.
Next day we sailed around to Sagone. The wind was really kind so at last we tried our new Spinnaker. And it worked! The Rollgen makes handing really easy and it pushed us along at 3 Knots with 6 Knots of wind. Very impressive! Sagone turned out to be a bit disappointing. It’s mostly concrete hotels with hundreds of small local moorings making it impossible to tuck into shelter. There are hundreds of water skis, Jet Skis and other high-speed thrill seekers rushing around past the anchored boats making massive wakes until it was almost dark – and they started again at 9.30 in the morning.
The following day we had thought of going to Ajaccio, the capital of Corsica. In the event we decided that we weren’t that interested in big city life and anyway it looked very expensive. Having plenty of supplies still on board, we changed our mind and went to Porto Pollo. We haven’t regretted it!

On the way, after all these years sailing, I saw my first school of Dolphins! We've been to places where they say you can walk across the sea on their backs - but never a sniff! L has seen them everyone else I know has seen them but until now, they've boycotted me!

Porto Pollo is a pretty little village set in rolling hills. It has friendly staff, plentiful supplies and even a free Internet Cafe. The swinging moorings are easy to grab, well sheltered and only €16 per night. We’re off to see an megalithic site called Filitosa today. Apparently the Menhirs have faces carved into them.

Toulon to Corsica

We arrived back in Toulon on the evening of the 12th after a long train journey. Eurostar to Paris, across Paris on the Metro and then down to Toulon on the TGV. Apparently there had been a fire on the metro and the direct line between Gare du Nord and Gare de Lion was closed. Complete chaos greeted us when we arrived - armed police everywhere, Ticket machines not working, escalators, paltforms and trains crammed. The good news is it was free. The bad that carting large quantities of luggage through a very crowded metro is not fun!
We stayed a day (Wed) in Toulon provisioning, adjusting the rig (done very badly in Port Napoleon) and I thought it in danger of collapse! and other odd jobs.

The weather forecast for Friday is really dire - up to gale force 9! so we decided to go find somewhere to moore nearer Corsica so as to get a 22 rather than a 26 hour passage. We set off at 8.00 and at 13.00 called Cavaliere-sur-mer for a place - only to be told that it was full. Called around every other sensible marine in the area - and they're all full. Welcome to the French Riviera!

With the only anchoring now available we had to find a good sheltered bay. Winds forcast to be W to NW so fortunately the three large bays at the tip of the St Tropez peninsula were all good candidates. When we got there at 1500, they were of course packed but we knew most of the motor boats would disappear as evening approached so we set down a temporary anchor in deepish water and went for a swim.

Overnight, we had much more swell than I expected (it was diffracting round the point). It was uncomfortable and a bit sleepless but not dangerous. In the morning we moved round the point to a much more sheltered spot - and waited for the wind to get up!

And get up it did! It got stronger and stronger through the afternoon and evening till it was clocking over 35 Knots - and that was in shelter. We got no swell or chop but did get thrown around all night but our wonderful spade anchor performed flawlessly so we got a surprisingly large amount of sleep. I always have a hand held GPS on anchor watch by the bed which contributes hugely to my ability to let go. At 7.00 the wind suddenly died in 10 minutes to almost nothing.

We measured the journey to Calvi in Corsica as exactly 100 miles. At our average of 5 knots, that's 20 hours. We wanted to gett to Calvi early in the morning to ensure we got a place so we left at 10.00 on Saturday. At first there was very little wind. We put up all sail but even so we were only making 1.5Knots so we hoisted the Iron topsail.

We were 5 miles out when I spotted something yellow about a mile away which looked like an inflatable or possibly a liferaft. We couldn't just go by in case someone was in trouble so we diverted only to find that it was a towing toy for power boats and empty. We called the coastguard anyway just in case and they seemed pleased to be told.


As soon as we cleared the shelter of the coast there was a heavy swell left over tfrom the previous days storm. After about 3 hours the wind ros rapidly and was soon getting up to 25 Knots on the starboard quarter. With a 3M Meter swell it was just too uncomfortable so we reduced to part jib anda double reefed main and that's how we stayed the whole journey. I thought we were in for a nasty night as big waves would keep coming out of the darkness and slapping us in the chops. In the event though it was lovely. There was a full moon making easy to see everything, the wind dropped to a comfortable 18 Knots and the swell died away to about a Meter. We even had a completely unexpected partial eclipse of the moon!



By 0200 Corsica was clearly visible and remained so all the way until we arrived in Calvi at 7.15. The only excitement was dodging a couple of thunder storms which caused the otherwise steady wind to change rather unpredictably. As expected, there was no help with mooring until they clocked on at 8.30 so in a heavy wind we set too. Not our finest hour!

It was a horrible arrangement with a very heavy rope attached to the bottom of the buoy and a strong wind blowing us off in a tight space. We tried and failed 5 times - including dropping the boat hook which luckily floated. We were both tired and tetchy and ended up shouting at each other. L came up with the brilliant idea of tying the dinghy to Rosa's bow with her in it with a rope. I manovered up to the buoy, she passed it the rope through the loop and back up to me. A quick tie and it was Job done.

They moved us later but gave us help. It was well worth doing though as it ensured we were given a mooring and at a reasonable time. It was also a good thing we had telephoned 24 hours in advance. The place is packed!