René’s old blog

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 subsisted until after Castelsardo, and the muscles are still a bit sore.

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’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:

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.

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.

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.