After a second night on anchor in Stagno Torto, (and a much calmer night, may I add), we decided to take advantage of the better weather, and head around the top of Sardinia, and sail a little way down the east coast to the Porto Cervo area. Now, if like me, you’ve never heard of Porto Cervo before, let me set the scene.
Porto Cervo is on the Costa Smerelda, which seems to exist solely to provide a holiday playground for the sailing jet set. It’s not for impoverished millionaires, but for those with the next level of assets; billionaires. I did some digging around, and in summer 2019, the estimated value of these floating palaces came to $4.27 billion! As you can imagine, a good number of these belong to that particular breed - Russian oligarchs. But the area also attracts its share of celebrities. The hotel at Cala Volpe has hosted visits from Elton John, Princess Diana and Leonardo di Caprio, but more interestingly, the 007 film, the Spy Who Loved Me - with Roger Moore - was filmed there.
After three nights at anchor, I quite fancied a night in a marina, so I Googled rates for Porto Cervo marina. Once I’d managed to work out which category of length and beam we fitted in to [Ed, “miniscule”], and added in the charge for electricity, water, garbage disposal and service charge, it came to €375. Hmm, perhaps not then. Back to our faithful on-line anchoring guide, Navily.
In a previous blog (The Maddalena Archipelago - blimey, it’s busier than the Solent…), I said that I hadn’t seen so many vessels. To be fair, it wasn’t just huge gin palaces, but small ribs, dinghies etc, as well as sailing yachts, catamarans, and small speed boats. Most of these were sporting the Italian or Sardinian flag [Ed, there is an independence movement on the Island], so definitely the holiday season for many.
We sailed along to our chosen anchor spot. A yacht came the other way, sporting an inflatable pink flamingo on deck. We smiled indulgently at it, obviously a toy for a small child. When we reached the bay, Cala Liccia, we weren’t surprised to see it already full of boats of all shapes and sizes. Our faithful anchor app told us that much of the bay had a rocky bottom, but that we should anchor in the large patches of sand. We slowly chugged around the bay, with me at the pointy end, peering overboard in polaroid sunglasses, working out whether we were over sand or rocks, and communicating this back to Richard at the helm.
There was a nice, large, patch of sand just to the left of a very large gin-palace, called SPACE. We decided to drop our anchor there. The back of the yacht was open, and a huge, inflatable playground was floating in the water, with a small boy playing on it, aged about 7 or 8.. Sometime later, he was joined by a man. We didn’t see a woman, and Richard wondered if she was in the board room, conducting early morning trades in Asia. A young girl, aged about 8 or 9 stood and watched from the decks.
Richard was a little concerned we may have laid our anchor over one of the two chains of this superyacht, so he dived down to look, and came up to say we had crossed anchors, and we needed to move. Just as we had finished getting our anchor back on board, a member of crew from the gin-palace shouted over to tell us they were leaving anyway, and were deflating the playground.
We therefore waited until they had finally got themselves sorted, and we could pinch their anchor space. While we waited, another, slightly smaller gin-palace nosed in looking for a spot, and eyed us up. They moved straight towards us in a slightly aggressive, “I-look-down-on-you-because-I’m-much-bigger-than-you” intimidating way, but we remembered the sketch from the Frost Report and didn’t budge.
Richard did a great job of keeping MB in the same place while we waited. She is not the nimblest boat we’ve ever sailed. She carries a lot of weight up-front, with 60 metres of anchor chain, a 300-litre water tank, plus the bow thruster and its battery. As she is twin rudder and folding prop, she is slower to respond to changes of direction, also has little if any prop wash to use in forward gear, than a single rudder boats, But we love her, and it’s a matter of getting used to her. The bow-thrusters do help.
While we hovered, I looked around at other boats. A large RIB came alongside a speed boat, and all passengers climbed into the speed boat and had lunch. There were lots of rental speedboats with long-limbed, semi-naked Italian goddesses (I hollered over to Ethel, I said don’t look Ethel, but it was too late). [Ed, I wasn’t ogling!] But my favourite was a small day-boat with a family on board, plus their golden retriever, who stuck his head over the edge of the boat, and watched all the comings and goings, with a slight aura of being hot and fed up.
Once anchored, we had a bit of boat admin to sort out (booking an engine oil change, and what a pain that turned out to be), so we had a quick swim and got on with it. Over the course of the afternoon, one-by-one, all the other boats left the bay, until only we were left. Was it something we said? What did they know that we didn’t? We checked the weather and wind; OK overnight, but could be thundery in the morning. Hmmm. But what we didn’t know was that large speedboats and gin-palaces ploughed back and for across the bay entrance until late in the night, setting up bow waves, that came into the anchorage and rolled us a bit. Oh well.
The wind conveniently stayed in the same direction all night. If we woke up at all, we could peer out of the window in our cabin (without even raising our heads from our pillows) and see the lights from the hotel on the shore. After a good night’s sleep, we were up and about quite early.
By 8am, we were joined by a large sailing boat called the Blue Papillon. Crew wearing matching turquoise shorts and navy polo shirts cleaned the decks. It was relaxing to watch. I felt I should be doing the same [Ed, she should], but I didn’t have the same uniform. Idly, I Googled her. Wow. At 43m, she sleeps six in three en-suite staterooms, all with entertainment centres, and has room for four crew in two en-suite cabins.
My search was rudely interrupted by a smart looking man, dressed in a white polo shirt, driving a posh RIB. He sped into the bay, slowed down, chugged around, looked closely at the Blue Papillon and off he went. Shortly after, SPACE (the gin palace from yesterday) re-appeared, accompanied by the RIB. He was obviously the advance guard, sent to check out if there was room etc. It was quite a big bay, so I assume they weren’t too annoyed to find us still in their spot.
Their anchor technique was interesting. They dropped an anchor in one place, then motored slowly to drop the other anchor way off. [Ed, there two anchors were almost perpendicular to the bow on port and starboard, and when tightened, kept the bow absolutely rock-solid in position.]
Just as they had finished anchoring, disaster!! Small boy on SPACE let go of his balloon, which floated down onto the water, and started drifting over to us. All hell was let loose. Small boy screamed, shouted and cried. But all was not lost; smart-looking-man in advance guard speedboat motored over to the balloon, wrapped a large cloth over it (some new anti-covid technique?) and scooped it into the speedboat, which is now quite near us. The man and small boy on SPACE cheer! We smirk, and clap, shouting bravo. The guy in the speedboat, who now has his back to the gin-palace, takes a short bow towards MB, and then rolls his eyes at us.
But that was just the warm-up act. Now is the time for the cabaret to begin. Slowly, the stern platform on SPACE lowers into the water, and four crew appear, wrestling the inflatable playground from yesterday. I was going to read, but I grab a cushion and some popcorn, and sit back in comfort in the cockpit and enjoy the show.
It takes four crew a good 30-45 minutes to get the playground inflated and out on the water, plus another 30 minutes or so of two crew to make sure all connections are properly done up. Meanwhile, the other two crew wipe down all the water and salt marks on the back of the boat.
And in five hours’ time, they will have to dismantle it all over again. At least the inflatable pink flamingo could be lashed to the deck.
P.S. This morning, we had rules of the road rights of way over a 44m sage-green yacht called Moka, with masses of satellite communication equipment on top. They politely waited while we chugged past (no wind) and we thanked them and took a photo. If two men in balaclavas steal on our boat tonight, we are more than happy to delete the photo. Gulp.
