Porto Venere

Indifferent weather and fatigue kept us at Lavagna for four days.  We finally got an OK weather forecast on Sunday 20^th October and headed off in the general direction of La Spezia, about twenty five miles away.  The wind was on the nose yet again but we had bright sunny weather and moderate seas.  The coast to La Spezia is very rocky and much of it is the land of the Cinque Terre, a group of isolated coastal villages, some perched spectacularly around small natural harbours.  La Spezia itself lies at the bottom of a large gulf, a bit like two outstretched arms.  The last four or five miles of the rocky coastline we travelled that day is actually the outside of one of the arms.  About where the wrist would be our charts and pilot book showed a narrow channel about one hundred metres wide and less than three metres deep in places, by a small village called Porto Venere, which leads directly into the Gulf of La Spezia, thus avoiding the trip round the hand (actually a small island).  From about five miles away we could see a dip in the rocky coastline where the channel should have been.  From about three miles a large castle was visible to the left of the dip.  The channel itself was not visible until we were within a few hundred metres and fortunately two large trip boats showed us the way in.  It’s a strange feeling going straight at a rocky coastline then having it tower above you on either side.  The echo sounder showed the depth plummet from forty odd metres to just four or five, then suddenly on our left the harbour of Porto Venere hove into view.  Having seen just a handful of boats all day we were confronted by a busy and picturesque little harbour, full of yachts and tourists out for a Sunday stroll with more yachts at anchor in the calm waters of the Gulf of La Spezia.

Our pilot book said that there was only room for thirty odd yachts in the harbour and it was often not possible to find a place, but we went in anyway and to my surprise were directed to a berth.  So within the space of thirty minutes we had gone from a sailing a lonely and barren coastline in moderate seas to the flat calm shelter of a busy tourist trap.  In a daze we wandered the narrow streets of the town in which Byron once lived and out of which he drowned whilst swimming across the Gulf of La Spezia.  A careless lot these romantic poets –shortly before this Shelley had drowned on the other side of the Gulf when his yacht sank on a passage from Livorno.  In their honour the Italians have an alternative name for the area – the Gulf of the Poets.  I can understand why Byron liked it here, the scenery is straight out of a gothic novel – an old harbour with tall quayside houses, dominated by a church and a castle on separate rocky promontories from which can be seen the windswept and barren coastline on the other side of the Gulf.  To complete the day we dined at a very friendly local Trattoria by the harbour which was full of the buzz of local families having their supper.