but as we were waiting for our new crew (my uncle Micahel and cousin Lukas) to come with us across to the balearics, we anyway planned on staying in cagliari for a couple of days.
after taking them aboard and checking the weather files over and over, we decided to take our chance and use a little windhole the mistral provided to make it around to san pietro. carloforte has quite a well protected marina and the island is supposed to be wonderful...so why not hang out here and wait for a good time to cross to menorca? but we had to get there first. we got up at sparrow's fart and at 7.30am we were out of the marina in cagliari with a sky looking like a grey soup that could either turn into a wonderful surprise lunch, or a nasty pot of stinkin' brew. well, guess what we had!?
the first downpoor got us 1h after we left and from that on, we went through rain front after rain front. the waves had built up in the last 3 days of mistral to quite a substantial size for the mediterranean and with the wind now doing a 360° with every rain front, some quite interesting pyramidical cross seas built up.
i was expecting a massive bout of seasickness from our new crew - and who would have been surprised with the boat rocking and moving and splashing down the waves.
but there is apparently a lot of seaworthiness in styrian boys! - no green faces, no fear! good on them blokes!
we tied off in the marina sifredi in carloforte planning to wait for the right pattern of wind to shoot us across to menorca. just as i was writing this post mark came with a pretty grim face and said something i don´t like to hear " karline, we have a problem!"
we discovered saltwater in the bilge under our front bed - and this is not to joke with. we just spent more than 3 hours searching for the leak, hoping desperately that our first thought (being that the bow thruster would have suffered some damage in all that smashing about) would not be true and water may have come in through somewhere on the deck of the boat. unfortunately the first thought was right! a bit of laminate around housing of the bow thruster must have loosened up resulting in about 1 teaspoon of water coming in every 10 to 20 minutes when the boat was still. no idea how much it was under way.
so, a leak under the waterline....not good!
thankfully with the help of a neighbor in the marina who happened to be a boat surveyor for the last 40 years and the crew from the sifredi marine boatyard of carloforte we could get evereything fixed with the boat in the water. a diver sealed the area, and once dry it was laminated over from the inside - diver chiseled the seal off again - and all good!
even though our stay in carloforte did not turn out as expected, i surely will remember this little town with a fond feeling not only for being cute, but especially because of the people we met. there were Andrew and his lovely wife Shelly who helped us with their truely amazing experience of years of boatbuilding and living the sailor´s life, there were the lovely people from the marine sefredi, who though our italian was as bad as their english gave us great tips for dinner and taught us about san pietro and it´s history and there was Nicoletta, our helpful neighbor, who jumped in as a translator and left us with wonderful potatos from her garden and a glas of fantastic homemade strawberry-jam and an invitation to see her in turin.
nevertheless, time moves on, and the part time crew has a flight to catch, so we made our way to mahon on menorca. unfortunately this time with too little wind which had us motoring almost all the way...but at least gave Lukas the chance to catch the first tuna!!!!!
appart from the great catch nothing special to report! a wonderful night, a great sunrise ...welcome to spain!
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| rain! |
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| more rain! |
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| wet! |
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| they know how to build boats in carloforte...and rescue ours;) |
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| Lukas Bluefin Baumann (+ his helper Michael ;)) and his big catch |
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