Corsica here we come!!! ( via a pod of Dolphins!!! )
20 June 2013
Stuart
Another day in hell…. Up at the crack of dawn…. Yep really it was a 7:00 cast off, still calm sea and a nice gentle wind on our beam to push us across to Corsica
It was by our standards a long crossing… 40 odd miles 8 hours… well a bit less fair winds helped us to average nearer 6 than our normal 5kts… Oh and that’s with the motor of course… med is full of motor boats… some like ours have masts as well, but for us at least its nearly always motor sailing, but today we did manage an hour with just the sails till the wind dropped and we dropped below the “magic” 4kts, that is our unofficial…. “bollocks to this start the donkey and let’s get going!!!” moment
Anyhow about 5 hours in over the VHF we hear Admiral Julie from Ace Challenger, our traveling companions “ Dolphins on the starboard bow”…. They were a few hundred meters in front… Ron insists his boat is faster than ours….. well to be fair he has got 50 more horse power and 20 more years’ experience than us, so we let him lead the way … Stella was on the helm, and engaged warp speed to us as close as fast as she could…. As it happened she needn’t have bothered the pod, or at least part of it came gliding across to us, we stopped cos we didn’t want to risk damaging them on or prop, they swam around us for a bit and did the dolphin jumpy thing, but they seemed to get bored and started to swim away….. we started up again and they all came back, they seemed to like keeping up with Tarian, actually swimming in between the hulls, turning on the sides and back looking up at us, like we were the ones on show for them…. This lasted for 15 to 20mins… a very special thing it was too…. At the end I felt hungry… I wonder what Dolphin tastes like??? We had to make do with tuna and sweet corn in our Jacket spuds Have I mentioned that Stell is a maestro in the galley…
The rest of the journey was pleasantly uneventful…. I have to say that the Corsican sea is bluer than the Italian stuff…. Wonder if the people we will be as nice… time will tell
Until next time
Cap’n Stu listening on 72 and 16 Out ( cor I am I getting salty or what!! )