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.