The crossing from Porquerolles to Corsica drained both of us, in different ways. So, when the boat was secure in the bay at La Revellata, we had a cup of tea and some marmite on toast, before collapsing into bed for a grateful night’s sleep. The following morning brought a low-pressure system racing towards us from the French mainland. There were few places to hide. We seldom go into marinas, mainly because of the cost, but we put our tails between our legs and sought refuge in Calvi’s harbour. We motored across under a glowering sky. The bay was still calm and another Ovni idled at a mooring ball not far from the beach.
The marina RIB directed us to an exposed looking finger that lay open to the harbour entrance. Our request to move a little deeper into the harbour for protection received an indifferent Corsican shrug in response. I wasn’t sure if they hadn’t understood, or just didn’t give a toss.
We secured the laid lines to the bow cleats and pulled the stern as far from the concrete finger as we dared. We had to position Alter far enough away from anything solid to make sure her stern wouldn’t hit the finger. At the same time, we had to be close enough for the ladder to reach the shore, so we could disembark without getting wet. We doubled up the stern lines and took lines from midships to the finger to make Alter as secure as possible.
With the boat secure, we headed off into town to get some supplies and to search for a part for the gas system, which had developed a leak. On the way back from the shops it began to rain and we quickened our pace. The weather had sneaked up on us while we weren’t looking and had already whipped the bay into a seething maelstrom. The mooring buoy field, where the solitary Ovni had whiled the afternoon, was a line of breakers angrily pounding the shore. The Ovni was gone.
We arrived at the marina in driving rain, trying vainly to keep our shopping dry. When we saw Alter, we started to run. The marina was bedlam. Crews raced about trying to secure their boats. Alter, alone at the end of her finger, was bucking like an unbroken pony. She thrashed at her mooring lines, trying to break free. We watched in horror as a huge swell lifted her bow and smashed her stern against the concrete.
We had to get on board, but it was dangerous. The boarding ladder, precarious in the calm, had been flung from its place on the sugar scoop. A bent rung betrayed where it had come in to contact with something immovable.
We waited for a lull, and I leapt onto the sugar scoop. One of the new mooring lines, with a breaking strain of over five tonnes, hung limp in the water, splayed fibre testimony to the force that had snapped it. There was still a vicious surge in the harbour with the danger of the stern being smashed against the jetty again, so I ran forward to pull us even further away from the concrete while Nicky eased the stern lines. When we had done all we could, we retreated to the cabin to unpack our sodden shopping and change into dry clothes.
When the sea subsided, we emerged to crisp clouds and snow-draped mountains. I tried to get ashore using the damaged ladder as a passerelle. The dock was too far away and the swell still too big to rest one end on the sugar scoop and the other on the dock, so I rigged a line from the arch to support the ladder at its mid-point. Unfortunately, I didn’t get the mid-point quite right, because when I passed the halfway mark, gravity intervened. I had no intention of falling into the frigid water, so I clung desperately to the ladder, which writhed like an angry snake. My groin broke my fall and Nicky carefully retrieved me back to the boat while I tried not to cry. We shortened the stern lines again and I managed to get ashore without any more injury to pride or body.
The following morning a thin wind from the mountains had us dressed for winter. But it had flattened the sea and had enough strength to fill our sails. We still had over four hundred miles to go to Balestrate in Sicily, where we had to catch our flight to the UK. Seventeen days seemed like plenty of time to cover the distance, but we needed a weather window for the long crossing from Sardinia to Sicily, and wanted to get the autohelm fixed before then. So we departed Calvi for Bonifacio, where we hoped to find some of the spares that we needed.
Bonifacio perches on what seems to be an unbroken line of sea cliffs on the southern shore of Corsica. From the sea, it’s hard to imagine that it has a harbour. The chart shows an entrance to the east of the red and white lighthouse. But even through binoculars, the cliffs there seemed impenetrable. We dropped our sails and motored cautiously towards the light house. A small boat carrying tourists materialised from the rock and darted into a deep sea cave at the base of the cliff. The channel finally revealed itself, bounded by sheer rock on either side. We followed the narrow channel and turned sharply right turn towards the town. We slipped into an inlet just before the marina where there were mooring balls and hard points ashore to secure the stern. It was a new manoeuvre for us. The inlet was narrow, leaving little room to pick up the mooring ball.
We secured the bow, but before I could get ashore in the dingy with a stern line, the wind blew us off and left Alter in the middle of the channel, parallel to the shore. I kept rowing, but the mooring line wasn’t long enough. I didn’t have another with me, so I tied the dingy’s painter to the end of the mooring line and kept rowing.
I was still a meter away from the shore when I ran out of line and I was forced to jump overboard and become part of the rope by hanging on to the dingy with one hand and reaching for an anchor point ashore with the other. We finally secured the boat, very happy that there’d been no witnesses.
We took the burst hydraulic line to the only chandler in town, who greeted it with blank incomprehension. Our last chance to get the autohelm repaired before the crossing to Sicily was in Olbia in Sardinia so we left Bonifacio the following morning and continued south, threading our way through the Maddalena archipelago, the islands that speckle Sardinia’s north-east coast. Warm azure water lured us to linger, but another low pressure system threatened and we wanted to be sheltered when it struck.
We tied up alongside a stone quay in Olbia’s old harbour with the help of some local fishermen, and I immediately set out to find a chandler. Six kilometres of walking and two chandlers later, the man behind the counter shook his head ruefully at the sight of the hose and sent me to Gottardi, a tyre specialist, two doors down. I was dubious, but desperate and went there with the burst hose and a bag full of pessimism.
The Gottardi man spoke little English. He gravely inspected the perished hose and its fittings. ‘No inox.’
‘Scusi?’ I asked, in my best Italian.
‘This inox. We no have inox.’
By then I’d learned that inox is a French abbreviation for stainless steel and guessed that it was the same in Italian, but I didn’t have a clue what bog standard steel was called. ‘You have steel?’
He shrugged as if I’d just asked a stupid question, ‘Si!’
‘You can make one?’
I followed him down a short ramp to a basement filled with spare parts and heavy machinery. He rummaged through cardboard boxes of fittings, selected two, tested them, cut a piece of hose to length and took the pieces to a large red crimping machine.
Ten minutes I had a newly manufactured hose, almost identical to the sample that I had brought him, and a bill for thirty-five euros.
I presented the hose to Nicky with a flourish, as if it was a trophy. But getting the hose made was the easy part. The hydraulic ram had to be removed from a confined space under the cockpit that was barely big enough for an octopus. Nicky took over when my cramped hands couldn’t hold the spanner any more. Her skinny fingers had more room to manoeuvre. But once the new hose was fitted, the ram had to be replaced again, a process that drew blood and a litany of profanities from both of us. Then the system had to be bled through a bleed screw that refused to budge. With the help of some heat we managed to loosen it, almost losing the tiny ball bearing that jumped out and fled towards the cockpit drain with purpose. And when the system had been bled and refilled with hydraulic oil, it had to be recalibrated. It refused. We followed the instructions precisely, but every time the process was complete, we got an error message. Night fell and we went to bed exhausted and frustrated. I lay awake half the night, going through the steps in my mind, trying to determine what we were doing wrong until eventually I fell into a restless sleep.
The following morning after breakfast we tried the calibration again and it worked first time. We were ready to press on south, but the low pressure system was still lurking, so we postponed our departure for another day and, with Alter safely tied up in Olbia’s secure harbour, we went shopping for a new mirror for the head.
