Arriving in Cagliari

We’ve now reached Cagliari the capital of Sardinia, at the island’s southern tip.  We’re in a small marina tucked into a far corner of the big harbour.  It’s the kind of marina I like, a collection of rickety pontoons full of small local boats, where people pop down after work of an evening to tinker or go for a quick sail off the harbour mouth.  It could be one of a score of little places on the East Coast of England, except the setting Sun is a bright yellow disc in an orange-brown haze and there’s is a wind blowing like you feel when you open a fan oven.  In the middle distance I can see the old town of Cagliari on its defensive promontory, the ancient centre of what is now a large urban tower-block sprawl of some quarter of a million inhabitants.  Across the harbour there is a flight of flamingos silhouetted by the setting Sun, something may have disturbed them from one of the salt lakes behind the City.  They fly in a straggling formation, first a long shallow V, then a wavy line, then there are two formations following one another, the changes happening in slow motion.  Something else you won’t find in an East Coast marina are the dogs, four of five of them, mongrels big and small, sprawled panting on the pontoons, too hot to move, so you have to step round them and sometimes they will summon the energy to follow you with a sleepy, half-interested eye.  Over on the large asphalted jetty to which the pontoons are attached is a collection of old fishing boats and their associated nets and rubbish and on the other side of the jetty a young guy fishing, his girlfriend by his side looking bored.  Nearby their modern sporty saloon car is parked, its door wide open and a pop song blaring from the car stereo.  I like this place.

Although we’ve now been in Sardinia for about five weeks we feel like we’ve only scratched the surface.  Much of the coast is just like the holiday brochures show - rocks, fine sandy beaches, sun and crystal clear turquoise waters.  Snorkelling around the boat I can usually see the anchor as clear as a bell from ten or twenty metres away and the shadow of the boat shimmering on the rocky and sandy seabed.  Most of the development, even away from the strictly regulated Costa Smerlda is low rise and low key, with many miles of completely empty coastline interspersed with small holiday developments and campsites.  I get the impression that the Costa Smerelda has had an enormous impact on the tourist industry here, but that outside the North East coast of the island the model doesn’t work as well.  In the height of July and August Porto Cervo is so popular that the marina there can charge 120 euros a night for a boat like ours and still be turning yachts away.  However, on the South East coast, just as spectacular, a modern marina has been built at Villasimius and is only half-full with all of the units in its shopping centre empty and unlet.

During our recent whirl of socialising our plans for the summer have begun to crystallise a little more.  In a few days we will leave Cagliari and make the 160-odd mile crossing to Sicily from where we will go on to Calabria and then probably back up the Italian coast to Rome via Naples and Capri.  We will most likely over-winter in Porto di Roma, an enormous new and for the time being very empty marina at Ostia, where the Australian Catamaran Squadron have negotiated an extraordinarily good deal for itinerant cruisers.  We then intend to spend the winter deciding exactly what we intend to do with the rest of our lives, an endeavour in which we continue to fail miserably.

Arbatax

 We continued our slow progress south arriving in the small port of Arbatax on the 15^th of July, where we met Keith and Doreen.  If one of the things we are doing is finding out about different lifestyles and how to construct a new life for ourselves, then these two are a very interesting example.  Keith is sixty and a retired fireman from Coleshill in the West Midlands and Doreen is a Londoner in her mid-forties.  They met when Keith was cruising around Spain in his catamaran “Atreyu” about eight years ago and over the last five years or so they have created a life which seems to suit them remarkably well.  They spend their winters in Coleshill, where Doreen works in an Asda Supermarket and their summers in Arbatax.  In April they load their old Mercedes up and drive from the West Midlands to Sardinia, where they prepare and launch the boat, then spend the summer cruising and socialising.  Doreen speaks good Italian and they have a wide network of friends in Arbatax and Coleshill and seem to enjoy the change from one place to the other and getting the best out of the two very different cultures.  As Keith says “our friends at home assume that we must be rich to have this lifestyle, actually it costs us no more, possibly less, than living in the West Midlands all year round”.

I guess the nearest we’ve come to getting a taste of the “real” Sardinia has been in Arbatax.  Basically it’s a small town with a large but relatively little used port.  Inside the port is a small marina, also half-empty, with very friendly and helpful staff.  On the quayside is pretty bar and restaurant decked out in blue and white painted pine boarding under the shadow of an enormous boatyard which builds gas and oil rigs and is a hive of noisy activity.  From Arbatax runs a little single-track railway into the interior, open only in the summer for the tourists.  We spent a day on it stopping for a “typical Sardinian” lunch in the little town of Sadali.  The train comprised a small and very old diesel-electric unit pulling two very worn out and graffiti covered carriages.  We had a three-hour ride up into the hills with the train having to edge cautiously across many ungated and unmanned level crossings, tooting its whistle to warn any approaching cars.  The train had two guards (one for each carriage) and two drivers (one to steer and one to read the paper) and most of the tiny stations had at least two staff and an immaculate office with a mahogany desk and large posters of timetables and regulations.  The countryside was greener and more fertile than I had imagined, with vineyards and olive groves giving way to cool pine forests on the edge of which grazed horses and cattle.  Everywhere motorists and people working in the fields would stop and wave to the engine driver, as to an old acquaintance.  Sadali, when we got there was closed and after our “typical Sardinian” lunch of salami, bread gnocchi, roast suckling pig and fruit, there was little to do except sit in one of the town squares with some of our fellow tourists and watch three or four kids kick a football around.

The next evening we hung around Arbatax port with Keith and Doreen for the start of the annual town festival.  There were crowds of what seemed mainly local people being served plates of mussels by members of the local fishing cooperative from two enormous steaming pans.  There was a small funfair, where we rode the dodgems and went on one of those big cars shaped like a boat which swing up and down, pendulum fashion until you feel queasy.  Oddly, the centrepiece of the evening’s entertainment was a display of Portuguese folk dancing.

As we motored out of the harbour on our way down the coast, Arbatax and its hinterland made me think of all things of rural Ireland, although without the clouds and torrential rain.  A world where people do what they do, projects get half-finished and tourists are treated with low-key hospitality and perhaps a degree of puzzlement as to why on earth they’ve come here when they probably have their own perfectly good homes.

The King of Tavolara

We finally prised ourselves from the convivial scene at Porri and sailed on to Tavolara, a spectacular island that rises sheer out of the sea off the coast of Sardinia with a razor-like summit.  At one end is a shingle and sand spit with a small jetty and a couple of restaurants.  Having anchored and been for a swim I noticed a small white sailing boat nosing its way towards the spit, “Sue, could that be ... well bugger me it is ... Russell”.  We quickly rowed the dinghy towards him as he was dropping the anchor.  On board with him was Alain, a French friend who had been crewing with him for a couple of weeks.  In the three weeks since we had parted we had managed to cruise about a quarter of the coast of Sardinia clockwise, while Russell had raced the other three quarters the opposite way round. 

We spent a great evening in their company wandering around the shingle spit and visiting the island’s small cemetery, where the “Kings” of Tavolara (population about 22) are buried and watching the Sun go down over the Sardinian hills.  Later we went to one of the two restaurants and then ended up in the local bar with a crowd of very pissed German yacht charterers and toasted each other with “Myrto”, a Sardinian liqueur that tastes remarkably like cough mixture.  We returned to “La Fulica”, anchored under the majestic granite slab of Tavolara at about one in the morning.  It was a wonderfully warm and starry night, the silence pierced only by the occasional birdcall and the cries of German yacht charterers, literally screaming drunk and blasting off their foghorn into the still night air.

Next morning we said our final goodbyes to Russell, who was heading for Olbia, or “Oblia” as he insists on calling it, where he was dropping off Alain and picking up his niece.  

The Anchorage at Porri

No sooner had we said goodbye to John and Chris than we fell in with a group of boats anchored in Porri, a small bay in the Golf of Olbia, and had our first introduction to what might be called the Australian world cruising fleet (catamaran squadron).   Chris and Karyn have a cat called “Magic Carpet” and are nine years into a leisurely circumnavigation and Manuela and Jerry and their children Jack and Jess live aboard “Pagan II”.  “Pagan” is permanently based in the Med to give the children some stability and to allow Manuela, who is actually Swiss, to stay in contact with her family.  “Pagan” now spends much of each summer in the same bay, where Jerry and Manuela have a network of friends and make some money by informal chartering.  Five or six days quickly disappeared in a social round of swimming, drinks on each other’s boats and beach barbecues.  Then we made the fatal mistake of going out for a day sail on “Magic Carpet”.  It’s the first time I’ve sailed on a cat and the experience was an eye-opener.  The boat was fast, stable, spacious and a perfect platform for the bank of solar panels needed to provide the electricity to live aboard comfortably.  Both “Pagan” and “Magic Carpet” have water-makers and because of their stability can lie at anchor almost indefinitely, without the need to go into marinas occasionally for water and to connect the boat to the umbilical chord of a shore power supply.  

During our trip I was selling “La Fulica” in my head, buying a cat and living aboard permanently.  In the evening I returned guiltily to our little boat, feeling very disloyal.  Later over a beer at a beach barbecue Jerry confided in me -

“I’m sorry mate, it’s a terrible thing going out on a catamaran, I made the same mistake myself and before I knew it I was forcing my way onto every cat I saw asking to have a look round and now we’ve blown 200,000 euros on a new one and still have the old monohull to sell”.