René Seindal

I have decided stop my journey around Sardinia here in Fertilia.

My primary reason for embarking on this trip was to recover from a depression I had after a marital crisis last year. I wanted to get away from everything, try something new, have freshes impulses in my life and hopefully come back a fitter person, in every sense of the word, ready to take on the challenges of a ‘normal’ life again.

Over all the journey has fulfilled its purpose. I have seen new places, met new people, gotten new friends, learned much about kayaking and the sea, and about team paddling. It has been a very refreshing experience, and I’m very happy that I took on the challenge when the opportunity presented itself.

Unfortunately, the paddling partnership between Wendy and I didn’t work out as expected. In the end, our relationship grew so sour that it became detrimental to my stated aim with the journey, to recover from my depression.

As I continued on alone, walked the streets of Fertilia, had a coffee in a bar, ate in a restaurant, and slept under an open sky near the harbour, I had ample time to ponder what to do. My initial impulse was to just continue alone, following the path set out time ago, but as I thought things through and searched my feelings for an answer, I kept returning to the ‘why’ question.

Why did I go? To get to feel better after a nasty crisis in my life. Does the thought of continuing along make me feel good? Not really. Then why continue?

Now the decision has been taken, I do feel better. I take that as a confirmation that I have done right.

Wendy and I have for some time had disagreements, mostly on questions of time and speed. Our disagreements has proven irreconcileable, and yesterday at Porto Ferro we decided to go on separately.

Wendy left before me this morning. I have no information on her whereabouts.

I’m currently at Fertilia just north of Alghero. Tomorrow I will have to do some shopping at Alghero. I have no maps and no mapcase. I will also need a paddlefloat, and I have no tent pegs for use with my tarp. I have no tent either, but it is hardly worth buying a new tent for whatever remains of the circumnavigation of Sardinia. I’ll try to manage with the tarp.

Blogging will probably be more irregular now. My old (non-sponsored) internet tablet doesn’t charge the battery anymore, so it will soon die on me, and Wendy has (as far as I know) no mobile phone for internet access. I charged my internet tablet battery on Wendy’s tablet, and she used my mobile for internet access.

I’ll try to blog as often as possible.

We’ve had a hard day on the beach today.

The sun was relentless, but we did manage to send several text messages, shave various body parts (apparently Wendy and I have different predilections there), do some laundry and cook an edible meal of italian noodles, which they seem to call ‘pasta’ down here. Only at that point did we succumb to the heat and sought refuge in a nearby bar for coffee, beer and chips.

Paddling is not just aching muscles.

It can also be waking up to a beach full of sand looking at derelict old edifices:

or being forced to have your morning cappuccino in the wrong kind of cup, eating Sardinian cakes from the previous day:

or discovering that the copious amount of excess belly tissue it took years to build up, has now suddenly vanished:

Life is hard.

I have a history of back problems. It is a growth problem from my childhood, my vertebrae are slightly deformed and therefore more at risk of dislocation. When that happens it is pain beyond words. The whole back locks up in a spasm making just about any movement difficult and very painful.

My back has dislocated a few times, and it is a constant fear that it should happen again.

I started paddling on the advice of my chiropractor, and it does help. I have felt lots better and safer, without any of the little signs that the spine was unhappy.

About a week ago, as we paddled towards the Archipelago di Maddalena on the Costa Smeralda I started getting very sore muscles in my lower back. It was just after a fall on a brink at Golfo Aranci, so I obviously got quite afraid for the state of my back. These pains have sussisted until after Castelsardo, and the muscles are still a bit sore.

It took a few days paddling to figure out what was going on. We paddled in waves of over 1m all those days, and more often that not waves from the side or from several directions simultaneously. Most of the days in waves we also did non-stop paddles of 3-4 hours because we had little possibilities to stop.

The Skim Distance is very long, giving it good speed and directional stability, but is also susceptible to being pushed sideways by waves, which means constant course corrections when in difficult waves. Do that for 3-4 hours without any breaks without previous training, and you’ll have some sore edging muscles in the lower back. Do it for several days in a row, and you’ll have some seriously aching muscles.

It has given me some really bad days on the water, but at least I now know that it is not because my spine is dislocating, but because those muscles are badly overworked. There’s a cure for that: training.

The last two day’s paddling has been in much easier water, and I have had no problems. We’ve done long hours at good speed, and I have not had any pains. The muscles are still a bit sore, but not in a problematic way.

This being my first long journey in kayak, I’m not surprised some mucles are complaining, but I would have been less scared and bothered had it been somewhere else than my lower back.

We’ve had a very short but active day on the water. We started from Vignola Mare at about nine, in moderate weather conditions. We had a good NE wind, around F4, and some following waves of 1-1½m. We had a fun ride down the coast, with tailwind and following waves, but after an hour and a half the waves were occasionally up to some 3-4m, sometimes breaking over our heads, and the wind was now more like a F6.

We found a fairly sheltered landing spot a Costa Paradiso, which is little more than two hotels, a couple of scuba diving centres and about a million tourist houses scattered up the hillsides. There’s no beach, but we landed on a concrete ramp used by the motorboats of the scuba centres.

We risk being stuck here for several days if the wind doesn’t wind down, but at least one of the hotels has a nice bar and restaurant where we can hang out, drinking cappuccinoes and blogging.

Wendy and I have been blogging quite actively during our time in Sardinia. We’ve been blogging on the beaches, we’ve been blogging in the streets, we’ve been blogging just about anywhere.

There are few internet cafés in Sardinia, home internet diffusion isn’t very high and in any case, we haven’t been invited in anywhere. I guess this is too much tourist country to expect the locals to invite any traveling stranger into their homes.

We blog and do email using a small technological wonder, the Nokia Nseries N800 Internet Tablet.

The N800 Internet Tablet is a small portable device intended to do “internet anywhere” just like the mobile phone has given us “telephony anywhere”. The tablet is the size of a large chocolate bar, weighs about 150g and fits easily into a pocket, or in our case into a small dry bag in the day hatch.

We write on it using a stylus on a small on-screen keyboard, or as I’m doing right now, using a full screen thumb-board. We also have a separate foldable keyboard we sometimes use for writing or editing longer texts.

We can get on the internet in two different ways. The tablet has wi-fi built in, but we haven’t found any wi-fi hotspots here in Sardinia, so we use our mobile phone as a modem, connecting to the internet using a technology called EDGE. We found an offer of 100Mb traffic for €20 which has lasted until now at least.

When we do a blog post we first write it off-line in the little Notes program on the tablet. Then we select photos on our cameras, and crop, resize and downscale them directly in the camera. The SD memory card from our Pentax Optio cameras fits directly into a memory card slot on the tablet so getting the photo over is just a question of taking the card out of the camera, plugging it into the tablet and moving the photos over using the File Manager on the tablet.

Once the post is ready, we go online, login to Blogger, copy-paste the blog text over and upload the photos. This is often the most time consuming and tedious part, as Blogger can be quite flakey sometimes. Uploads and publishing often fail and have to be retried several times before everything goes through.

The little maps showing our location are also made on the tablet. We have a little wireless gps receiver for the tablet, and it is a matter of seconds to get the coordinates and have them plotted on a map. I use a free program called Maemo Mapper, which will basically do it all for me. I just have to zoom in to the desired level of detail and grab a screenshot of the display.

The software in the tablet does way more. We read our email on it, using the mail program or one of the free webmail services. It also has a million features we don’t use much on this journey. It is an IM client for chatting, it is a multi-media player for both music and video, it can work as a soft-phone and much more.

I have been using the Nokia Nseries N800 for over a year now, and it is one of my favourite gadgets. I use it daily, even at home, for reading news, listening to music, chatting with friends, looking up stuff on the internet while
watching tv, etc.

Nokia Nseries has generously sponsored us a complete communication set for our journey. Wendy got a tablet so we both have one, and we got a foldable bluetooth keyboard, a bluetooth gps receiver and a car charger for use with our solar panels for charging on beaches.

Wendy is so happy with her tablet and the possibilities it gives to blog and mail friends, that she cares more about charging the phone and the tablet that about her camera batteries, and that says quite a bit, knowing how avis a photographer she is.

Wendy busy beach blogging:

My office set while in Venice:

We’re sitting on top of a bronze age monument, a Nuraghe, with our Nokia Nseries Internet Tablets. I’m blogging this while Wendy is writing emails to a friend in Iceland:

Wendy just took a picture of me doing this post:

This is the view in front of me rigbt now, with Corsica in the background:

The Nuraghe Tuttosoni is here:

We woke up to force five to six winds shaking the tent. Wendy was up in the middle of the night to drag the kayaks further up on the beach.

It is unlikely we’ll be paddling anywhere today unless the wind calms down a bit.

Yes. I know. We’re a couple of chickens

We have had quite a weather day today. We started early because we had camped on a beach smack in the middle of Santa Teresa Gallura. No point in inviting trouble since we did camp illegally once again.

The water was very calm as we started but as we approached Capo Testa we heard thunder, and as we were halfway around the cape we saw lightning and it started to rain.

The rocks at Capo Testo are truly amazing. They’re sculpted by wind and waves into a million different shapes, and we spent a good time taking photos in the ever changing light of sunshine during rain with a rainbow.

After Capo Testa we moved down the coast, but my aching back got really bad in the waves, so we turned in for a short break on the first beach we found. I set up all the solar panels, ate a biscuit and fell asleep while Wendy went rock watching. In Italy time is different, so our short break lasted two and a half hours.

When we were ready to set out again, the wind had grown stronger and turned west, so we almost had a straight headwind again.

The rest of the day was a slow push against the wind. We continued until the little town of Vignole Mare where we set up camp on the beach, almost under one of the old Spanish towers.

We’re having dinner in a local restaurant now. Not bad, but they had most unconventionally put bacon in my plate of penne all’arrabiata. That’s definitely a no-no in my book.

Let’s hope that tomorrow, we enjoy fair tailwinds.