Other boats have already escaped; PYXIS and ENYA have gone to
Tunisia. Lynne (ex-MOYA) has gone to
a new life on a catamaran. YELLOW BIRD has headed off towards Gibraltar, come back (due to bad weather), and gone again.
TYFON also headed off for Tunisia but had to come back after
running into bad weather and ending up with damage to the sails and rigging.
Luckily Delores and Preben were OK, if a little
shaken.
Karen and Richard leaving on PYXIS.
Rosi and Otwin just about to leave on
ENYA.
We, however, are still here in Cagliari, and will probably stick around for
most of May (we’ve paid for the whole month…). For a start, although the weather
has improved, it still isn’t really settled enough to anchor comfortably yet.
Every time we think the weather has settled, we get another blow through.
During one blow, the end of our pontoon buckled badly at one of the joints, and
we all pitched in to help move SKYSONG onto a more stable pontoon. SKYSONG
belongs to Michael Buerk (of BBC fame) and his wife Chris who were weather-bound
here for a few days on route to Turkey with their friends, Liz and
Bill.
Moving walkways…
We also have other reasons for sticking around. We are hopefully
going to be doing some First Aid training (basic first aid plus second
aid for yotties in peril on the sea – you know, injecting vodka into oranges and
sewing up chicken legs in case we ever need to do this at sea). We did go out
for a sail on Saturday, but it was too bumpy to anchor anywhere so we had a
brisk sail back in. I've got plenty of work on and have also been commissioned
to carry on writing my series (up to part 6) following the antics of the
'intrepid Smith family' for Sailing
Today.
More boring boat
jobs
David has been really busy with boring boat jobs. Mr Stainless Steel
came and opened up our pushpit (metalwork at the back end). With the pushpit
opened up, we were able to fit our bargain boarding ladder, which means that we
will now be able to get onto the boat out of the water without having to climb
into the dinghy first. As we can now fit the passarelle to the stern and walk
through rather than clamber over ironwork, we also have the option to go
stern-to against the pontoon, which is much more sociable. Reorganizing the
pushpit generated lots of other work – moving the stern light and re-routing all
of the wiring for the various aerials. We now have music in the cockpit
as David fitted the outside speakers that we have been carrying around with us
since we launched CAPE in February 2006. Other
jobs that have been ticked off the list include:
·
fitting a shelf/barrier
in the hanging locker to stop things dangling in the fridge
compressor
·
putting extra fiddles
in the galley, under the chart table and under the companionway steps to stop
the kitchen stuff/generator/toolboxes sliding around when we are at
sea
·
getting our big gas
bottles refilled (people who write in pilot books that gas bottles can be
refilled obviously haven’t got the gas bottles that we have…)
·
servicing the Aries
self-steering gear
·
sending the Iridium
satellite phone to be fixed, as it appears to have developed a mental disorder –
hopefully it should be back from the Iridium phone hospital in the
USA before we leave
Sardinia!
David re-routing the wiring at the
stern.
We
thought that David had managed to fix the outboard, but when we got it out to
play safety boat for canoe races, it was back to its old tricks of a) not
starting and b) spewing petrol everywhere once it did start. It had also been
working on a new trick on the quiet – seized gears. David took it off in a
marina car to find the outboard hospital and the engineer quoted us 400 € just
to have a look at the carburettor problem. As there is no greasing nipple for
the gears, they cannot be greased without dismantling the whole engine – this is
a special Suzuki design feature apparently. David brought it back to think about
the problem and give it one more go himself and the starter button
disintegrated, so we have given up on it, stripped it of useful bits and spares
and will try to get hold of a second-hand 15 HP, 2-stroke at some point
(not this month!).
Beth, Bryn and I marked up the dinghy, canoe and petrol
tank, stencilling on our registered number and green frogs to identify them as
ours and hopefully put anyone off pinching them.
Bethany and Bryn marking up the dinghy.
Bryn caught the stencilling bug and moved on from the
dinghy to pillowcases and T-shirts…
The CAPE merchandising
department – frog pillowcases and…
…frog T-shirts.
If we carry on like this, the list of boat jobs might
actually get shorter not longer!
Catapults, canoeing and
other water-based activities
The children are currently into catapulting, fishing for
blennies and starfish, and canoeing.
Bethany honing her skills
in the CAPE seagull and crow repellant
programme.
We borrowed another canoe and had races with Julia (WILD
OATS) and Conrad (AYA) to the dry dock and back.
David stirring water.
Julia racing back from the dry dock – note the sky with a
thunderstorm brewing in the background!
Bryn beating Conrad back to base.
I fell into the marina. I was reaching for a rope and
tripped over a plank on the pontoon. I have to say that the water was quite
warm, and it wasn’t a shock going in because it was one of those inevitable
things that happened in slow motion! I was giggling before I even hit the water…
David is now calling me ‘Flipper’.
A change of
plan
Having said that we were going to potter slowly around
Sardinia and Corsica this year, we are
seriously thinking of going a little further afield. Of course everything does
depend on how the engine behaves, but we have decided that we don't want to just
hang about waiting for it to go wrong (which is what we feel we are starting to
do), and that we will deal with it going wrong wherever we are. We were toying
with the idea of joining the Vasco de Gama rally in 2011, which goes from
Turkey, down through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea and across to India (dodging
the pirates off Somalia, of course). However, having been in touch with the
organizer to find out more, it turns out that this rally is likely to be the
last one. So we have provisionally put our names down. The rally leaves from
Turkey in October 2009,
visiting Cyprus,
Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, Yemen, Oman and India, arriving in Cochin in April 2010. The
extra incentive is that there is another boat – with children – booked to go on
the rally too. We would still like to have a look around Sardinia and Sicily, before heading for Greece (the Ionian) and then on to
Turkey for the beginning of October.
The engine is still a sticking point, so plans may change again. Hopefully our
German engineer will still be able to join us at some point during the summer to
sort us out with a new engine head and piston valve(s). I am now worrying about
when and where I will be able to get internet access…
Sagra di
Sant'Efisio and other reasons to party
St Efisio is the patron saint of Sardinia, so the May Day
celebrations are big here in Cagliari, with the Sagra di Sant'Efisio – the
Festival of St Efisio – held from 1–4 May. Efisio was a commanding officer in
the Roman army and was sent to Sardinia to
suppress Christianity. Things didn’t go quite according to plan, however, and he
had a vision similar to the one Paul had on the way to Damascus, and switched
from persecutor into ardent follower of Christ. When he was asked to deny the
Christian faith he refused and was sentenced to death. He was imprisoned in
Cagliari, but
was then moved secretly to Nora 40 km further down the coast to prevent the
people from protesting against his sentence. He was beheaded by a Roman soldier
on the beach at Nora in the year 303, where there is a tiny church dedicated to
him. St Efisio is also attributed with saving Cagliari from an outbreak of plague in
1650.
According to my internet research, the festival is one of
the largest and most colourful processions in the world, involving several
thousand pilgrims wearing 16th and 17th century costumes, oxen carts, musicians
and mounted pilgrims and soldiers, who accompany the statue of the saint on a
pilgrimage from Nora to Cagliari and back again over 4 days. We arrived early to
get a good view, watching the oxen-carts-and-foot-pilgrims part of the parade.
Rose petals are scattered as they go, so a thick bed of rose petals develops as
they pass. We gave up after 2 hours in the sun and went off to find a drink and
look at the tourist tat stalls set up along the front along the length of Via
Roma – apparently the procession takes about 5 hours to pass!
There are carts from each town and village in Sardinia, each decorated with flowers and examples of
local products and handicrafts – drawn by very impressive and beautifully
groomed and decorated oxen!
Each town and village has its own distinctive costume,
with permanent-pleat skirts, lace blouses, coral jewellery and colourful
embroidery for the women.
Even the children have full sets of traditional
costume.
Musicians playing the traditional Sardinian launedda – an
ancient polyphonic reed instrument that is made of three canes (sounds a bit
like a cross between a recorder and a bagpipe).
Knowing my luck, if I’d been born Sardinian, I’d have
been born in the village that wore just black, with an interesting shawl
arrangement designed to accentuate the female bottom…
Sardinian woman 1 to Sardinian woman 2; “Does my bum look
big in this?”
There was a large festival on in the Fiera (congress
centre near the marina) timed to coincide with the Sagra di Sant'Efisio. It
included folk dance displays, Sardinian arts, crafts, food and wine, home and
garden displays (Ideal Home Exhibition – Sardinian style), tourist tat stalls,
and agricultural and industrial exhibition, as well as large fun fair. The
children bumped for Wales in the bumper cars and took a
Harrier Jump Jet ride in a simulator. We bought a new frying pan as the handle
has fallen off our old one.
The kids bumping for Wales.
The arty bit at the
end
I have managed a couple of watercolours for Big Dave
(BRUMBY), and branched out into a new medium – oil pastels – for a study of some
rusty old chain in the cantieri.
‘BLACKBIRD’ number 1.
‘BLACKBIRD’ number 2 (with penguin at the
helm).
Delores says I need to work on people
next…
Rusty
chain.
