Port Man
03 July 2008
Another blow was forecast, so we hauled up the anchor again and headed to a small creek on the north-eastern tip of Ile de Port Cros, called Port Man. This whole island is national park, heavily protected from fires (no smoking, camping, barbecues) and development.
This is a narrow anchorage, further shrunk by the no-anchoring areas at each side, roped off to protect the weed on the bottom. The sides are very steep and covered in the aromatic pine forest, home to some of the noisiest cicadas we've ever heard. It gets very full at weekends (according both to Peregrine and the pilot book), but we timed our arrival for 1100 on Thursday. There are four distinct waves of movement on this coast: morning departures (0700 to 0900); lunchtime (1130 to 1400); afternoon dip (1700 to 1900) and overnight arrivals (1800 to 2100). So 1100 is a good arrival time to secure a slot.
It's also pretty deep, but we were glad to get ourselves a nice spot in 13m of water and get the anchor in securely after only 2 or 3 attempts. We are definitely considering finding another secondary anchor as our trusty 60lb CQR is challenged by thick weed. It ploughs up the stuff (which is ecologically very bad news) and doesn't hold easily.
Once in, we had very good protection from the westerly and north-westerlies. We could see the white water in the sea between us and the mainland, and the clouds boiling over the hills around us, but inside the crevasse we never saw more than 24 knots of wind and held pretty steady.