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.