Carloforte, Sardinia

After the eventful voyage from Tunisia that both boosted and dented our confidence, it was nice to finally have a short and calm day-sail along to Carloforte. We spent two whole weeks in Cagliari waiting out the worst of the headwinds. We felt refreshed and ready for it, even keen.

We had also organised with the Aussies to meet at Carloforte for dinner and were looking forward to seeing our friends again and finally sharing our story of the journey across from Tunisia since we hadn’t seen them since. Our attempt at a dawn departure was sadly delayed by waiting to settle up our bills at the marina, yet the late start let us set off into the warmth of the morning sun with barely a cloud - a blessed thing when Sailing in the winter. 

With 25 knots behind us and 60 nautical miles ahead of us along the south coast of Sardinia, it was a perfect day to try out the new pulley system for the wind vane as a test run for the longer trip to Menorca.

Our third-hand Windpilot had so far been merely hitching a ride for 1300 miles, yet after a bit of fiddling to attune to the wiggle of the boat we settled into a calm, straight course. The only problem was the strange vibrations that seemed to be resonating through the hull caused by the movement of the water over the pilot’s rudder… but it’s a nicer sound than the squealing of the heroic Autopilot with its constant begging to be bottle-fed, and presumably there’s a way to work that out. That’s a problem for another day! 

We headed into Carloforte harbour, the nearest marina to the Balearic Islands and our “waiting room” for the next however-long-it-takes-for-the-weather-to-clear. With the wind dying down to only 10 knots the pressure couldn’t keep the vane straight, so we turned on the engine in the still waters of the bay, one of us steered in the dark whilst the other went up to the bow to keep an eye out for fishing pots that the Aussies had told us to look out for.

We arrived to a warm welcome, Hannah, Matt, John and Alison, and Ralph the dog were waiting for us on the pontoon, and we stepped almost straight off the boat to dinner with them. We dined in a local restaurant that felt almost carved from the rock in the barrel vaulted cellar of a building in the small town. 

Carloforte is mostly a summer getaway for the local Sardinians and the island is only reachable by boat. It’s on the one hand, understandably quiet and secluded in the autumn, and on the other shockingly lively for such a small corner of the world. Halloween evening was spent at a tiny pub in town-square. It had seemed as if the whole town was out for music and a puppet show as kids scrambled through the legs of the chatting adults holding glittering sparklers.

At the marina we got a small taste of home, emanating bouts of techno at random times of the day, a race boat, full of tall, beer drinking Germans vacationing in the most stress not-free way one could imagine - delivering the boat to the starting line for the transatlantic race.

But of course there is no such thing as a week without anything breaking down on an old boat. Ever since Tunisia we have noticed a strange, unpleasant smell around the galley. We came up with a wide variety of speculations as to the source of this smell (somewhat like a rotten egg), but it wasn't until we settled into Carloforte that we finally realised that the fleeting stench and the constant setting off of our gas alarm was not actually from the gas bottles – which we had meticulously looked over to the point of madness – but in fact from our dying started battery! It turns out that our dying acid battery was venting sulphur fumes and a suspicious bubbling liquid into our bilge… Oops. Luckilywe had the world’s most helpful marinero looking after us and he magicked us a new starter battery for a fair price within no time.