We picked up our anchor around 17.00 and motored across to the other side of the inlet to Porto della Taverna. As is often the case the word ‘Porto’ simply means a bay not a port in the normal sense. This is a very large bay with reasonable shelter except from the north east though it wasn’t the most attractive place we have been in, flat land and a long beach with no other real features. There’s lots of space to anchor however which turned out to be needed. As we manoeuvred to drop anchor Chris realized that Splice was not responding normally, we were not going where he intended! After drifting in circles for a minute of two whilst we looked in the water and played with the engines we found that we had normal control on the starboard engine but no power in forward on port. We used reverse which worked on both sides to edge ourselves out into deeper water and dropped the anchor there to try and sort out the issue. The props looked clear from on deck and were working in reverse so it was probably a transmission problem. After checking out the engine-room cable connections we found that whilst connected there the cable did not respond to the movement of the levers above at the helm. Access to the underside of the helm controls is via the back of the wardrobe in the port cabin allowing you to climb into a small area with the electrical connections and other equipment. It is small and as the temperature was in the mid 30’s it was hot. Chris found the problem easily as the port transmission cable had come loose, getting it tight again required 20 very sweaty minutes and contortions to get at a screw that tried very hard to be inaccessible. The obvious solution to the remaining ‘hot, sweaty Chris problem’ was to jump overboard. We then re-anchored normally and had a peaceful evening until bedtime. We had just dropped off to sleep when Mitch forgot about the time difference and phoned us. We resettled and then the anchor alarm went off even though we had set it on a large arc. Kill the alarm, joke about whatever next and settle back down. Twenty minutes later (around 23.30) the disco started on the beach, it was loud, we could hear all the words and sing along if we were inclined. This continued until 03.00, sleep was pretty much impossible, Chris spent much of the time reading as you couldn’t block out the noise. We slept in late the next morning!
Porto della Taverna – a wide area to anchor, sandy and good holding ……..but don’t stay the night if you want to sleep!

Photo: Isola Tavalara from our anchorage in Taverna (there wasn't much to photograph in the anchorage)