Saturday April 7th
We motored into Portoferraria, the main port on the Italian Island of Elba, at dawn this morning after two days' motoring from Marseille.
Live-aboards are a special breed, and both Lyn and Paul certainly have the quality. The marina staff in Port Napoleon were 'too busy' to help much, so Lyn decided they would sort out the navigation lights themselves. A couple of hours with their heads stuck in the forward sail locker, and we had working lights.
No sooner had they got them working and gone elsewhere for the next job, than a workman decided to undo all their work and 'fix it himself'. Lyn had a few choice words with him, and he left.
Paul and Lyn have also fitted an 'Electro-san', an electrical American device which sanitises the output from the toilet, thus dispensing with the horrid holding tank problems. The marina hadn't fitted one before, and Paul had his head in the toilet for the next few hours, sorting that out. The rest of us went elsewhere.
Finally on Tuesday April 3rd, we slipped lines at Port Napoleon and made our test sail and motor to Fos to take on fuel, before sailing for Toulon. But all plans are provisional. We found that the Raytheon ST60 log and speed were not reading, and we had no signal on the Navtex so no weather forecast.
We have three compasses - two steering and one fluxgate compass powering the autopilot. There were an equal number of different bearings for the same heading. Paul removed all his heavy iron tools from the cockpit lockers, but it made little difference. A quick check with the handheld compass told us to trust the fluxgate, use the starboard steering compass for pilotage, and disregard the port steering compass completely.
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| Paul takes a break from essential maintenance |
And in an area famous for sudden strong winds, neither Lyn nor Paul had harnesses, having decided that Plastimo lifejackets without crotch straps and no self-inflating system were not sufficient. So we put into Port-de-Bouche for the night. It was a good thing we did, as the winds reached 50 knots and continued throughout the following day. Extra lines were put out to hold Corifee to the rather insubstantial pontoons.
We finally left the bay on Thursday 5th at 7.30am, with hardly any wind, so motored up to Toulon through a nasty chop that didn't do my stomach any good. With still no forecast from the Navtex, and what little wind there was hard on the nose, the sensible course was to motor on up to San Remo, get a weather check there, and then go across the Ligurian sea to Elba for our first major stop.
It was Lyn and Paul's first ever night sail, and they were new to watch-keeping, so the task was not to over-stretch them. But again, I needn't have worried. They coped well on their own, even with a French pair-trawler which they first mistook for a lighthouse until it shone its spotlight on our sail, then pointed to the second of the pair.
A brief morning stop in San Remo, a good weather forecast, and a 22-hour motor across to Elba, through the strait of Corsica. In the early hours we had heavy traffic in the strait which kept us busy, but we arrived in one piece in Elba this morning. Paul is still asleep, finding the watch keeping system a new experience.
After an American coffee and two Marmelado croissants, the list of jobs gets written. Top priority is finding out how to switch off the anchor and depth alarms on the Raytheon ST60 - no manual on board, and every possible combination of buttons pressed to no avail. We had to disconnect the thing in the end. Now off to find an internet café to locate the handbook and, hopefully, sort it out!
