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So it's been an incredibly busy week and that is my main excuse for both the delay in getting a new blog post up and the length of said post. Our last update was from Portoferraio in Elba which we departed on 19 October, heading towards the Italian mainland. We learned an important lesson in the subsequent days: the wind hates us. Wherever we're headed, the wind is guaranteed to be coming from that direction. If we decide to change our destination to put us on a more favourable course, the wind waits until we pass the point of no return and then changes just enough to thwart our cunning plan. It HATES us. The issue with tacking into the wind is firstly that the distance you have to travel is about 1.5x the distance if you were on a direct route, and secondly it's the waves. If you're going against the wind, you're also going against the waves which means it's rolly, slow, wet and uncomfortable. Not ideal. For that reason, we had a spat of long days (about 9-10 hours of sailing) racing against time to try to get into marinas before sunset (which was occasionally successful), followed by what can only be described as a holiday from our holiday in the form of a few rest days in Rome.
Of course there were also enjoyable moments during our long slog down to Rome, with one particular highlight being Castiglione della Peschaia. It was an accidental stop (we'd hoped to get further) and we were regretting it slightly on arrival when Starfire got stuck in silt at the entrance to the marina. Fortunately Gerard skilfully manoeuvred us out and at least now we have a reasonable idea what our limits are in terms of depth! Aside from that, we had an amazing evening and dinner in the cute little town and, to top it all off, while grumpily preparing the boat for the trek to the island of Giglio at 7am the next morning, an old man on a bicycle came and gave us a rose from his garden to remind us of our stay - amazing, it made our day! We were both sad to leave but also aware that we had to start getting some miles under our belts if we were going to make it to our wintering spot.
The journey to Giglio was not fun. The inside of the boat ended up looking like it had been ransacked and I had a brief altercation with the chart table which (worryingly) came off worse than my butt did. The waves reached their peak right outside the marina we were headed to which also happens to be the location of the tragic (now upright) cruise ship Costa Concordia - not very encouraging to have such a stark reminder of what can go wrong dominating the view in those conditions. We eventually made it in and, after an uncomfortable night, managed to find time the next day to do a walk up to the island's old town which I'm sure would have afforded incredible views had we not been in the clouds for 80% of it. Nonetheless it was very enjoyable and whiled away a few hours during which time the sea calmed down a touch. From Giglio we crossed to Cala Galera on the mainland and the next day down to Civitavecchia, both of which were non-descript from what we saw of them (which was not much since we were purely there to rest our heads). The whole journey from Portoferraio down to Rome took us 5 days and notched up 185nm in pretty rough conditions so after all that we felt we'd earned a bit of tourist time!
Our base while we were exploring the capital was in a place called Ostia which is probably best described as the Croyden of Rome. On the plus side, the marina was nice (primarily judged by the fact that they had warm showers - and big gates!) and transport links were pretty good so we spent 3 amazing days travelling in and out of the city and seeing the sights. We checked off most of the headliners - day 1 was the Vatican museums, Sistine chapel, St Peter's basilica; day 2 was the Roman forum, Colosseum and Pantheon; day 3 was the Spanish steps and a couple of lesser-known but also impressive churches. In between the ancient landmarks, we walked - and walked and walked. It's such a nice city to explore on foot, every street you turn down there's a slightly different feel and after 3 days we'd hardly passed the same spot twice. I also hadn't considered it before we arrived but it was so refreshing to spend time in a city again - clearly there's still some London in my blood. I won't labour through our every step but instead will summarise that my lasting impression of Rome is that they're big on ceilings. After 3 days of admiring them, my heart goes out to Michelangelo who by all accounts spent 18 hours a day for 5 years craning his neck while painting the Sistine chapel.
We're now in Nettuno and about to start island hopping towards Salerno. Hopefully that means more opportunities for anchoring since there haven't been many available on the mainland coast (apparently anchors and oil pipelines don't mix…). Based on recent experience it probably also means less well-stocked supermarkets so we've secured a few essentials to get us through, most exciting of which in my view is everything we need to make pancakes - this is the life!
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