Zigzaging between fish farms ....
Knotty Girl
Tanya/Roberto
Thu 11 May 2023 15:03
42:28N 14:13.7E We arrived today in Pescara after almost 5 hours of smooth broad reach SAILING . But guess what ? It is pouring rain… again… but what is happening this year along this coast ? Rain ? Cold ? Grey sky - well well well I am glad we are going south so hopeful the sun will come out at some point :)Going down the Adriatic side of Italy is good as their is a light current going south, hence our speed over ground is almost always bigger than our actual speed - yeeeee !! BUT this coast - at least so far is absolutely FULL of fish farms and isolated fish nets ! No wonder there are no more fishes in the sea… !!!! In addition that makes sailing and motoring not very relaxing as we are constantly on the lookout for those buoys & flags (for fish crates). Definitively I would not want to sail at night in this area unless of course we go very far from the shore (which is what we did when we went down the Portuguese coast for the exact same reason !). Yet, we did have 2 sunny days and during one of them we were able to do an anchorage (ohhhhh we were glad to be at anchor - which is difficult along this coast are there are very few protected bays) in Bay Porto Novo and it felt like real spring !!! Apart from that we had to stop in other harbours - Porto San Giorgio - not much to see there..., Porto San Benedetto - not much to see there except for South Harbour Wall (along the sea) full of big rocks sculpted by different artists and seeing for dinner (on Knotty Girl) one of Roberto’s ex-crew member, on his racing boat “Ready for Sea” whom he had not seen in about 10 years and who is a sailing instructor in this town (he came with his very nice girlfriend). We then sailed almost all the way to Marina di Pescara where we moored “à l’anglaise” which I much prefer :) and were we went out for dinner to taste both the arrosticini (specialty from les Abruzzo were we just arrived - sort of brochette of lamb - very good; and the Olive all'ascolana (big olives filled with meat and fried) - from the Marche region which we had just left also very good ! We were lucky as it poured rain just after we arrived there and stopped raining just as we went to the local restaurant in the marina ! We now just arrived in Marina Sveva after a bit of sailing and a lot of motoring - grrrrrr. One interesting feature of this coast is that practically all marinas have a silting problem and that makes entering them for a boat like ours that needs 2.3m at least, “interesting”: very narrow channels marked by small red buoys or need to follow a “pilot” dinghy to guide you in, and of course, unusual in the Med, you need to take the tide into account. Despite all precautions we exited Porto San Giorgio with the depth sounder screaming “2.1m, shallow water”: we must have left a deep groove in the fortunately very soft mud there!      |