Farewell to the Magra

So, we’ve finally managed to end our Winter hibernation on the Magra.  A lifetime of fixation with meeting deadlines has left its mark and we felt we really should get away by the end of April.  Late in our preparations for leaving we realised with a shock that April only has thirty days in it and not thirty-one, so we ended up going on the 30^th of the month, a day before we were really ready and precisely six months after we arrived.

In our last few weeks on the Magra we actually got to know more people than in the previous five months and we even got a few going away presents.  Roberta and Marianne gave us a plant, which Marianne explained was for Sue to put in her next garden, if and when we finally buy another house.  In calm seas it travels on our cabin roof, lashed to the compass with a bit of elastic.  I hope the poor thing survives,  but I have my doubts.  Roberto is an eccentric former village doctor (“il Dottore”) and Marianne is a Dutch ex-hippie, a volatile combination.  They live in a remote house in the hills with no mains power and have a charming wooden yacht.  Roberto loves to talk about village life and how when he married Marianne the local men would nudge him confidentially and ask “do foreign women do it the same way as Italian ones?”

Giovanni gave us a beautifully designed jamming cleat (a bit of obscure boat gear for the uninitiated) and an Abalone shell and his wife gave us a cake and his daughter a CD of the All Blacks chanting a Haka.  Giovanni is an ex paratrooper and steel worker who is renovating an old Sardinian working boat.  He speaks very little English and really helped our Italian.  After a days work on our respective boats Giovanni would look in for a beer and a chat, with our well-thumbed English-Italian dictionary between us to help things along.  One Sunday afternoon Giovanni finally persuaded me to go to Giancarlo’s restaurant/shabeen in a shack in the boatyard next-door to the marina.  Thank God I didn’t go earlier in our stay on the Magra or I don’t think we’d ever have left.  For ten euros we got risotto al marinara, roast sucking pig and chips (including baby pig’s trotters), all the wine we could drink, plus an evil looking liqueur which tasted like pure alcohol and condensed milk, all served on plastic plates and glasses.  The clientele ranged from a seventy year old estate agent, local boatyard workers in overalls and a suspicious looking bloke who claimed to have been President Ceauşescu’s sister’s bodyguard.  He added a convincing note of authenticity by explaining that his bodyguard status was really useful for getting off with women in the Black Sea holiday resorts in the good old days before the fall of the USSR.

On the day of our departure we had a small group to wave us goodbye from the quayside and Giovanna, the marina owner even gave us a Yacht Club Foce Magra burgee (flag) and, bizarrely matching slippers.  Previously she had already given us some marmalade made from the fruit of the marina’s two grapefruit trees as a thank you for doing some translation for her.  She and her ageing lothario husband Vittorio own a small complex of holiday apartments in Calabria and she is planning to advertise in English on the Internet.  So, if you see an ad for the “Molina sul mare” (“watermill by the sea”) in Calabria, beware, I think we overdid the description a bit and we’ve been told by others that the place is actually falling apart.

As the Magra disappeared behind our stern we were sad to leave and will retain many good memories.  Overall, everyone dealt with us very fairly.  I spent a couple of thousand pounds on maintenance and improvements to La Fulica and pretty well everyone turned up when they said they would, did a good job and charged us a fair price.  The most important improvement was the fitting of two solar panels.  We bought the panels second-hand from Arne (see earlier newsletters) who “found” them on a hillside in Sicily where they were part of an acre of panels which had been used to illuminate a hillside crucifix.  I gave him 200 euros, having beaten him up from his asking price of 150 (he needs the money more than we do).  Toni the mad welder made us special stainless steel brackets for them for 80 euros (these allow them to swivel towards the Sun) and Peiter the German electrician wired them up for about 200.  So for just over three hundred quid we have solar panels which are able to keep our fridge running in the Summer.