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.

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.   ...

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 o...

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.   Th...