40 45.985N 014 01.924E Procida, Italy

Pipedream
Sat 11 Sep 2010 22:32
We left Gaeta early without incident. After winding up all that rope in the prop I was glad there was no major vibration (at least more than I was getting...)and the boat moved when put into gear. We got into Procida around 3 PM, a small Italian island in the very northern part of the Bay of Naples. No trouble docking this time even though we were in a cross wind... the two guy on the dock and one in a rubber dingy making like tug boat Annie really helped as we wrestled Pipedream into position.

Today we had the first real sail of this leg. Weather was calling for variable wind around 11 knots. I was roused to action when about 20 kts of wind came up on our beam. John was below taking a nap so Katie, Jenny and I set the main and most of the Genoa and actually got to turn the engine off. We took off and were doing 7 to 8 knots. About an hour later I was thinking about shortening sail a bit when the wind clocked around 180 degrees and dropped to about 4 kts and we were forced to turn the engine on again. The Med.

We kicked around the town which is a page out of the tourist books on what an old unspoiled Italian fishing village should look like. After walking to the other side of the island we had lunch/dinner at a place overlooking the anchorage the fishing fleet uses. Katie got some good candids of an old fisherman mending his nets and some Italian kids playing soccer with an American style basket ball.

Dajahvoo, I realized I had stopped here before. We had a crew meeting and kicked around the idea of taking a ferry into Naples for a day tour tomorrow but decided on moving on towards Amalffi . Don't miss Katie's blog at: http://katiesailing.blogspot.com I think I put out a bad address last time. For those of you that figured it out all by yourselves... you get a hearty 'well done' and a gold star in your computer science workbook.