The King of Tavolara

We finally prised ourselves from the convivial scene at Porri and sailed on to Tavolara, a spectacular island that rises sheer out of the sea off the coast of Sardinia with a razor-like summit.  At one end is a shingle and sand spit with a small jetty and a couple of restaurants.  Having anchored and been for a swim I noticed a small white sailing boat nosing its way towards the spit, “Sue, could that be ... well bugger me it is ... Russell”.  We quickly rowed the dinghy towards him as he was dropping the anchor.  On board with him was Alain, a French friend who had been crewing with him for a couple of weeks.  In the three weeks since we had parted we had managed to cruise about a quarter of the coast of Sardinia clockwise, while Russell had raced the other three quarters the opposite way round. 

We spent a great evening in their company wandering around the shingle spit and visiting the island’s small cemetery, where the “Kings” of Tavolara (population about 22) are buried and watching the Sun go down over the Sardinian hills.  Later we went to one of the two restaurants and then ended up in the local bar with a crowd of very pissed German yacht charterers and toasted each other with “Myrto”, a Sardinian liqueur that tastes remarkably like cough mixture.  We returned to “La Fulica”, anchored under the majestic granite slab of Tavolara at about one in the morning.  It was a wonderfully warm and starry night, the silence pierced only by the occasional birdcall and the cries of German yacht charterers, literally screaming drunk and blasting off their foghorn into the still night air.

Next morning we said our final goodbyes to Russell, who was heading for Olbia, or “Oblia” as he insists on calling it, where he was dropping off Alain and picking up his niece.