Wendy and I have for some time had disagreements, mostly on questions of time and speed. Our disagreements has proven irreconcilable, 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 map-case. I will also need a paddle float, 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 any more, 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.
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.
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 subsisted 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 muscles 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 cappuccinos 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 travelling 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 flaky 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 avid a photographer she is.
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 right now, with Corsica in the background:
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.
Our good Venetian friend Marco Ballarin has been awarded the title of ‘Maestro di Canoa da Mare’. We know that Marco has worked hard for a long time to achieve this level of certification, so here’s a toast to Maestro Ballarin.
Today we rounded the northern tip of Sardinia, the Punta Falcone.
We spent the night on a beach in Cala di Trana, close to Palau. We launched on a calm and quiet day, almost no wind and little waves. It looked like a paddle in the park on an overcast day.
Within 30 minutes we got a slight drizzle, but soon all our landmarks were out of sight and we did another 30 minutes on the compass only, until it cleared up a bit and we got closer to the coast of Valle d’Erica.
We had hoped to stop there for a morning cappuccino, but there were no bars in sight with a good landing spot nearby, so we forgot about our little morning luxury and paddled on along the coast.
Not a second after we stuck our bows into the waters of the Stretto di Bonifacio we got a force 4 to 5 with 1-2m waves thrown in the face. We paddled with this companion on our right for a couple of hours, until we reached the marina of Santa Teresa Gallura, eager for a break and some lunch.
The marina is rather large and we paddled around for some time looking for a good landing spot close to the restaurant when we were approached by two very common looking assholes, one male and one female, who unceremoniously told us that ‘canoes’ weren’t allowed in the marina.
That led us to the conclusion that the people of the marina of Santa Teresa Gallura didn’t like our money, so we turned around and left. Fortunately, just around the next rock were the local city beach, where we could land in peace, be greeted by a couple of impressed locals, and have a good, albeit not inexpensive pizza with a clear view of the beach and our kayaks.
I have had some backaches since I slipped on the brink of beach at Cala Morescue and hurt my back. The pains have been manageable so far, thanks to regular short breaks, but our trip through the waves today made these backaches worse, and as we arrived in Santa Teresa Gallura my back was quite stiff and I had a hard time edging the kayak in the waves. After lunch we decided to stay the night in Santa Teresa Gallura to let my back recover. Hopefully the next days will be less exacting on my back, so we can keep a reasonable pace.
We’ve spent the time this afternoon reading and writing mail, blogging, updating our personal diaries, and charging all our depleted batteries.
Tomorrow we’ll round the Capo Testa and follow the coast SW towards Porto Torres where we’ll be in a few days time, weather, wind, waves and whining willing.
We in Città della Maddalena now. We’ve had a nice day paddling up the east coast of Isola Caprera and back down between that and the Isola della Maddalena. We expect to find a camp site somewhere to the west of here on the mainland.
The Isola Caprera has a magnificent rocky coast, sculpted into a million different shapes, some loking like animals, some like faces and others like abstract art.
