Porto Miseno anchorage

It's been an interesting day which started out with me accidentally getting covered in diesel from head to toe whilst kneeling over the deck filler listening for air as per the captain's instruction. Fortunately I was only wearing a bikini. With all the pitching and rolling we'd noticed a strong smell of diesel in the cabin. We assumed that either the breather vent or filler had split or was blocked. In hindsight we should have made the effort to look in the lockers first but that seemed like a lot of effort so we took the approach of using the dinghy pump to send a few bursts of air down the breather which I should have felt come out of the filler. Two pumps of air later and nothing happened but on the third a fountain of diesel spurted out to cover me. If it was blocked then it was certainly clear now! Our main concern was preventing the diesel spillage from entering the sea so a roll of paper towels were promptly stuffed along the deck before I could even start to think about cleaning myself. Cleaning Flirtie was easy compared to cleaning me as it took three showers and lots of liquid detergent - soap didn't touch it. After that excitement we looked in the lockers only to find that the breather pipe was covered by something that had shifted in the locker - a job now on the winter list to reroute the hose so this doesn't happen again.

We had the option to anchor off Ventotene but our pilot book (Italian Waters, 8th edition) suggested that the anchorage can be "a bit rolly here" and reviews on CAptain's mate also confirmed this. Instead we decided we'd spend a few days at anchor off the island of Ischia and Procida that lie on the SW side of the Gulf of Napoli only to find that anchoring is prohibited for non-residents during the months of July to September. (see links for the zone map and zone permissions). We were pretty disappointed but at least we were allowed to motor through the Procida channel in between the islands. In fact, as we motored parallel to Ischia a decent wind arrived resulting in a hive of activity aboard Flirtie as we unfurled the sails and enjoyed just over an hour of actual sailing with both the main and genoa set - hurray!

Porto Miseno harbour lies on the west side of the Gulf and is almost land-locked being totally sheltered on three sides. We passed a raft of mussel beds before entering the harbour which was full of day boats - clearly very popular with the locals. We knew that the majority would leave by sunset so we anchored and re-anchor later in the evening.

Total distance this season: 691.26 nautical miles