Algajola

While travelling the West coast we decided to anchor and go ashore at Algajola, a tiny resort where we had spent a happy two-week holiday about six years ago at the “Hotel de la Plage”.  While anchoring a man swam out and asked us a question in French with a heavy Franglais accent.  “Parlez vous Anglais?” I asked.  “Yes” he said, slightly put out.  We chatted for a while and it turned out he had a Corsican girlfriend and was also a Dorothy Carrington fan.  Later we met them both at the “Hotel de la Plage” for a drink and it turned out they had taken Dorothy C out to lunch a couple of years previously, not long before she died.  His description was of a formidable English upper class lady, known throughout the island as “Lady Rose” who spoke grammatically perfect French, but with a militantly English accent.  Looking back it’s a shame we didn’t swap contact numbers.

Capraia

On the tiny island of Capraia we met Guliano, a sophisticated Roman in his late sixties and his two travelling companions, both retired department store managers.  Guliano invited us to supper and it turned out he was, among other things, the retired General Manager of the shipyard just up the Magra from our winter moorings and that he and one of his companions lived in Monte Marcello, the charming hill village above the Magra.  Between them they were able to answer many of the questions we had about the local area to which we had been unable to find answers in our six-month stay, as well as many new facts.  “You know that the bridge over the Magra is able to open?” Guliano said.  “No” we replied doubtfully, (the thing looks like a fixed road bridge).  

Guliano explained that he had won for his shipyard a big contract to build plastic minesweepers for the Italian Navy, but the boats were too high to go under the bridge.  After six years of arguments with the local authorities he had managed to implement a design by which the middle span of the bridge slides open on hydraulics, driven by a portable generator.  “What were all the trucks doing moving dirt up and down the road to Monte Marcello all over the winter?” we asked.  “Ah, you noticed them” Guliano replied with a light chuckle.  “I’m having an underground car park built near my house”.  It was a lovely evening during which the guys explained that they were on an extended tour of Corsica and Sardinia, with constant calls from their wives about when they were coming home.  “We keep saying we don’t know yet”, Guliano explained with a twinkle in his eye.

A "Perfect" Evening

Occasionally in a lifetime a series of events provide the ingredients to create a memory of something “perfect”.  The actual experience was not “perfect”, but the mind edits the events into a concentrated and poetic whole which becomes further honed with the effluction of time.

One afternoon cruising around Elba we arrived in the Golfo di Viticcio.  The sea was oily calm and the sky a perfect blue with the faintest brown haze on the horizon.  We cruised up and down looking for a good spot to anchor, moving slowly across the clear water we could see every ripple of sand, every pebble and every patch of green weed on the seabed five metres below us.  Sue let the anchor go and it hit the seabed and let up a cloud of sand.  Sue let the chain out slowly until a few metres snaked lazily across the seabed and I turned off the engine.  The evening sunlight cast a perfect shadow of the boat on the sand below us, including the outline of my head gazing down through the sea.  The shore was about a fifty metres off, rock fringed and wooded, with a few silent villas visible through the trees.  The air was full of the high-pitched scream of swifts. 

We jumped into the tender and motored a few hundred metres to a pebble beach by a stone jetty to check out the local village.  The village restaurant was closed, so we walked to a nearby campsite which had a restaurant, the owner said that yes they were open that evening and they would be pleased to see us.  As we were launching the tender from the beach a ruddy faced man who was paddling along the shore picking mussels or clams waded out to us and gave us a helpful push into deeper water.

Back at the boat a shoal of blue fish swam beneath us.  Sue fed them bread and the wise old ones waited for it to sink before gobbling it up.  The impetuous younger ones circled in the deeper water before rushing to the surface and snatching the bread with a thrashing motion.  Sue gave air cover by shooing away a few predatory herring gulls who wheeled around the boat before gliding back to a nearby cliff.

In the evening we returned to the campsite restaurant to find just a few locals, including the man who helped push our tender, eating at a communal table on a terrace overlooking the sea.  Next to them a table for two had been set for us, with a sweeping view of Western Elba and Cap Corse, some forty miles distant.  We ate mussels which still had a tang of the sea, giant prawns and whole cooked squid while watching the sun set over Corsica in a kaleidoscope of reds, blues and purples.  We ate a desert of ice cream and strawberries covered in a caramelised sauce as the lights came on in the hill villages across the bay.  The cook/waitress seemed genuinely pleased by our compliments on her cooking.  “Will you come back tomorrow?”  She said.  “No, we are going to Portoferraio and then Capraia and Corsica” I explained.  “But you will come back some day?”  “Maybe”, I said.   

We waved drunken goodbyes to the locals and then puttered back to the boat in our tender, steering for La Fulica’s riding light, a pinprick in the gloom.  The man who had helped us earlier looked out at us from the restaurant terrace.  I think he was smiling.

Elba

From the Magra we headed south via Viareggio and Livorno to our first major cruising objective of the year – the island of Elba.  It was a warm and sunny day and we could see the island from about twenty-five miles off.  It’s a thickly wooded and mountainous place, the highest peak being about the same as Snowdon.  From about five miles off you can begin to pick out the outline of the sixteenth century fort which guards the approach to Portoferraio harbour.  After a quiet cruise from Livorno the harbour is hectic, with yachts all over the place and large ferries from the mainland coming and going every few minutes.  The place to be is the old 16^th century harbour in the centre of the town, built by Cosimo di Medici.  We called the harbour on the VHF but the response was an indecipherable crackle.  We pressed on anyway to find we were expected, with an Ormeggiatori (yacht helper) already standing by a berth for us.  The harbour is said to be very crowded at the height of Summer, but now it is half empty.

For the next three days we enjoyed harbour life, watching yachts come and go and being watched in our turn by the procession up and down the harbour of mainly German tourists.  We also hired a motorbike for a day and zipped around nearly all of the fifteen-mile long island.  We then took a very leisurely one week cruise around the island, stopping to sightsee, swim and sunbathe and lying at anchor every night, before returning to Portoferraio harbour, where we are again now.  Our circumnavigation was in part a training run for our summer cruising.  We soon settled into our roles with me as Navigator and Sue as Beachmaster.  Having chosen a likely spot to anchor we would check it out with binoculars and opened copies of our Italian waters pilot and the Rough Guide to Italy.  “That looks a nice cafe and I think I can see a water tap and I can see more people swimming off that stretch of beach so the water must be warmer there.  How about there?”

We found some lovely anchorages and the beaches are mostly pure white sand.  As well as Portoferraio there are a number of smaller towns and villages, mainly devoted to fairly laid-back tourism with no big hotel developments, but lots of campsites.  We had one uncomfortable night rolling around in a light swell and one noisy one.  We carefully picked a spot to anchor in a bay off the small harbour and resort of Porto Azzuro, near an area cordoned off for harbour works.  On the other side of the bay was a boatyard with an area walled around with hoardings displaying the “Prada” logo inside which where two very beautiful yachts out of the water.  The nearest, “Kookaburra III”, had lines so pure it looked like a piece of modern sculpture with a hull the colour of the morning sky.  Anyway, the cordoned off area turned out to be the night-time parking place of a huge floating crane which was nudged into place in the evening by a large tug called “Luigi” and completely blocked our view of Porto Azzuro and then left its generators running until precisely 2:31 in the morning.

Elba is a lovely island and as our Italian pilot says “I can’t think why Napoleon ever wanted to leave”.  It is not like mainland Italy, less Italian and more like a place where Italian just happens to be the lingua franca.  The people are quieter, more given to understatement and smaller in stature, I think.  Of course everywhere has its drawbacks and in Elba’s case I’m afraid to say that it’s ... the Germans.  Don’t get me wrong I like Germans, but they are everywhere and all the locals automatically assume that if you look like a tourist you must be German.  For some reason I find this very irritating, it’s not even that I’m proud to be English, it’s just that I don't like being mistaken for what I'm not.

With our arrival in Elba our journey has reached another phase.  Last year we reached the Med, but now, at last, we are in real cruising country and the kind of places that we would in the past have gone on holiday to.  I’m starting to behave like I’m on holiday, wanting to swim and sunbathe and eat out every night.  This is leading to some interesting questions which I am a long way from knowing the answers to as yet:

·       Are we on “holiday” and if so, when will it end?

·       When you are in one beautiful place, what is the purpose to of moving on to other “beautiful” places – to build a collection of memories of “beautiful” places maybe or because the next place may be more “beautiful” or to find the most “beautiful” to go back to and live one day?

·       Will we some time turn into a bay and say “yes, this is the place where we will stay” or will we pretend to ourselves that this is what we feel when we are tired of moving on or getting short of money?

·       Is this journey a preparation for some new phase of our lives yet to come or to strengthen us for a return to our old lives or is the journey itself the new phase and travelling our new mode of existence?

Maybe I’ve been looking at sunsets too long already.