S/V Spindrift

Nine days with the Lustys, Ajaccio to Olbia

It’s Sunday morning church bells ringing and we’re sitting in Golfo Aranci, a little ferry port on Sardinia’s northeast coast, about six miles up from Olbia. Terri and Michael left an hour ago on the train to the airport, a regional covered nose to tail in the standard Italian graffiti. Their flight leaves at 1400 local, 1200 UTC, for Milan and then home. The aft cabin is stripped. There are two coffee mugs too many in the drying rack. Sarah is on her second cup and neither of us has said much.

We’re not going anywhere yet either. Western Sicily is about 220 nautical miles to the southeast, roughly 33 hours at sea with one night out, and the wind is out of the south, right on the nose. So we wait for the tramontana, the north wind. The name means from beyond the mountains, and when it comes it’ll push us all the way down.

Nine days. Here’s what stuck.

We can’t promise where we’ll be

Back in June I sent Terri and Michael two documents, our seven-year expedition plan and a day-by-day passage plan for the fall, and told them to pick a window. Michael had a conflict in mid-September, so they took the back half: fly into Figari, at the bottom of Corsica, and out of Olbia, on the northeast coast of Sardinia.

I wrote back that we couldn’t promise exactly where we’d be on any given day, but Corsica is a small island. About the length of Long Island. We’d find them.

The Mistral had other ideas. We spent the week before they came pinned to a mooring in Calvi, up near Corsica’s northern tip, and they ended up landing in Ajaccio, 65 miles down the west coast, instead. That’s hosting from a boat. The guests have airline tickets and the boat has weather, and somebody has to bend. It’s never the weather.

In the end it worked out perfectly. We anchored off the beach at the end of the runway in Ajaccio hours before their flight came in at 1735 local, 1535 UTC, and picked them up with the dinghy right off the sand.

Michael on the beach at the end of the Ajaccio runway, waiting for his ride.

One head short

Calvi handed us the other problem too. After three months of summer storage, neither of our two heads would pump out. For anyone who hasn’t been aboard, a head is a boat toilet, and a boat with no working head is a campsite with better cushions.

So the day before we picked up the Lustys, I was folded into the aft head with a flashlight in my teeth, just like I remember it as a deckhand in the 1980s. The pumps had lost their suction sitting all summer. We found a new one in Calvi, and the aft head came back to life. That’s the Lustys’ head, the one off the aft cabin. We had it working with a day to spare. The forward head is still waiting on parts. Four adults, nine days, one head.

Nobody complained. Or nobody complained to me.

Terri and Michael taking a turn at the wheels

Porto della Madonna

After Bonifacio (that’s Shore Party No. 2, and the taxi home) we crossed seven miles of strait into Italy and the Maddalena archipelago, a scatter of granite islands off Sardinia’s northeast tip. At the top of it, three small islands, Budelli, Razzoli and Santa Maria, sit so close together that the water between them is nearly a lake. That’s Porto della Madonna. We tucked in off Santa Maria and stayed.

All four of us ashore in Bonifacio

Working the sail cover, with Bonifacio’s white cliffs behind

Chart briefing before the crossing. Michael is reserving judgment

It’s the color that gets you. Over the white sand in the shallows the water is so clear the boat looks like it’s hanging in the air, with the shadow of the hull lying on the bottom like it came loose. Further out it goes pale green, then turquoise, then through every blue there is until it stops at one so deep it doesn’t look real. The granite around the edges is pink and gray, worn by the wind into shapes that look poured instead of broken. When the breeze drops you can smell the scrub on the hills.

Nobody agrees where the name comes from. One story says there was a fisherman named Madonna. Another says it’s the blue of the Madonna’s cloak in the old paintings. The third says fishermen ran in here from storms and thanked the Virgin for the shelter. That’s the one that makes sense to a sailor. Three islands with a shallow pool between them, and whatever is blowing outside, it’s a lot quieter in here.

We all went in, and nobody wanted to get out. The Med is saltier than the ocean off Long Beach Island, because the sun here takes out more water than the rivers put back, and you feel it the second you lie back. You don’t so much swim as get held up. Arms out, ears under, toes poking out of the water without even trying, and the only sounds are your own breathing and a halyard tapping somewhere across the water. Across the way on Budelli is the Spiaggia Rosa, the pink beach, colored by the crushed shells of a sea creature too small to see. It’s been closed to people for decades, because visitors kept carrying it home in their pockets. You can look. You can’t land.

Sarah and I have been out here long enough that we’ve started grading anchorages like hotel rooms. Watching Terri and Michael swim off the back of the boat wiped the grades clean. Of everything in these nine days, this is the one Sarah and I keep coming back to.

Porto della Madonna, with Budelli, Razzoli and Santa Maria holding it like a lake

La Maddalena after dark

La Maddalena is the only real town in the archipelago, on the island of the same name, a short hop south. We went ashore at dusk and walked. Granite paving worn smooth, shutters open to the street, laundry strung between the balconies over the alleys. Old men on benches in the piazza arguing about something that had clearly been going on for forty years. Kids with gelato up past their bedtime.

Sarah and me, La Maddalena after dark

The place is called Ristorantino Sole di Sardegna, the little restaurant of the Sardinian sun, and it’s down a side alley off the main street, the kind of place you only find by walking past it and turning around. Maybe eight tables, a menu in Italian and not a word of English anywhere. Every other table was locals, the kind who don’t need a menu. Up front it was clearly family: a husband, a wife and their daughter, taking orders, pouring wine and clearing plates. The husband looked the four of us over the way you’d look at a dog that wandered into church, then decided we were all right and brought the wine.

I ordered the porceddu, Sardinian suckling pig. It’s a shepherd’s dish, made for Easter and feast days, roasted slowly over coals until the skin cracks like glass and the meat underneath falls apart. It came on a sheet of pane carasau, the paper-thin flatbread Sardinian shepherds carried into the hills for weeks, with roast potatoes and a sprig of myrtle on top. There isn’t much else to it, and there doesn’t need to be.

Porceddu on pane carasau, myrtle on top

Michael ordered the pork chop. It came out enormous, and he never touched it. Not one bite. At the end of the night he did what any good crewman does. He passed it aft.

Breakfast aft

On the old ships, breakfast told you where you slept. The men before the mast got burgoo. That’s coarse oatmeal boiled in water until it sets up thick and gray, then ladled out of the pot into wooden bowls. No milk. No sugar. On a good day there might be a spoonful of molasses or a lump of salt beef fat stirred in. One sailor’s memoir from the 1700s records burgoo for breakfast on Wednesdays and burgoo again for dinner on Mondays, which tells you most of what you need to know. The other choice was Scotch coffee, burnt ship’s biscuit boiled up in water and sweetened. The officers ate aft, from their own stores, with their own cook, and according to one naval historian the wardroom could turn out pretty much anything you’d find on a good table ashore. Anybody who’s read Patrick O’Brian knows how Jack Aubrey took his breakfast.

Tradition matters aboard S/V Spindrift. Next morning, Terri, Michael and Sarah ate burgoo. I ate Michael’s pork chop, cold, at the helm, on the way down the coast to Cala di Volpe, a bay on the Costa Smeralda about 15 miles south of La Maddalena. Like a post captain. It was better cold.

By the time you read this, Michael will be somewhere over the Atlantic eating airline food. I hope it’s oatmeal.

Fair winds from S/V Spindrift