Poetto Beach

Leaving Cagliari   

After a couple of nights in Marina di Sole and enjoying the delights of exploring Cagliari, it was time to move on. With a last shop for fresh food (milk and bread being priorities), the tanks filled with water and, perhaps most importantly, the marina staff paid, we slipped out of the marina and headed east to Poetta Beach. Poetta Beach is to Cagliari what Copacabana is to Rio, just with fewer Brazilian bikinis on display [Ed: probably; we didn’t get that close to the beach]! We headed there because the forecast was predicting a fresh westerly wind off the most southerly tip of Sardinia and, though we wanted to go west, we didn’t want to beat all the way there. As we left Cagliari, though, we motored into an increasingly strong southeasterly!

Poetto Beach by day and night   

Poetta Beach is only about 5nm from Cagliari so we got there within the hour and then had to find a space amongst the crowd of anchored boats. This being a Saturday (17 June), most of Cagliari seemed to be at Poetta. This included the local Hobie Cat racing fleet and a windsurfing club, both of which, given the brisk breeze, looked to be having lots of fun! We laid our anchor in a suitable space, far enough away from the breakwater of the fairly large but quite shallow marina to comply with Italian regulations but close enough in to try to gain some shelter from the nearby headland. We wondered if we should have just headed west on the assumption that if it were blowing a brisk southeasterly here, it probably wasn’t blowing a brisk westerly 15nm further south. But we would have been setting off quite late and arriving somewhere (who knows exactly where) probably after dark, which would have made finding a good patch of sand to anchor on a little tricky. So we stayed put; the wind was likely to drop later anyway. As evening approached, the bay emptied but our gamble on the wind dropping did not seem to have paid off. We moved in closer to the headland where the 2 other remaining yachts were anchored, if only to try to gain a little more shelter from the wind-blown waves, and prepared dinner.

Happily, by the time that dinner was ready, the wind had dropped away to nothing and sea had become nearly mirror calm with very little swell. It was a lovely evening and we were still close enough to Cagliari to benefit from some more flamingo flypasts.

Morning, anchored under the headland   

The following morning it was still mirror calm. Our forecast 10knot easterly wind on which we had planned to sail west had not materialised – we should have gone the previous day! We waited at anchor, catching up on the blog, reading and watching the bay fill up with visiting boats again. Cagliari’s yacht club had set a race course for their fleet which involved them sailing into and around Poetta bay and, as if to add insult to injury, with what little wind there was, all the yachts came into the bay from Cagliari under spinnaker. Clearly the wind was coming from directly where we wanted to be heading! But there was a glimmer of hope on the horizon – literally. On the eastern horizon there was a dark line on the sea – wind – suggesting that maybe it would build properly from the forecast direction. And then the racing yachts, having headed east towards Villasimius, turned for Cagliari and home under spinnaker again. At the same time, we could feel waves building and coming into the bay ……. the forecast easterly was coming! We hastily made BV ready for sea and as the anchor lifted out of the sand the wind reached us. We were off, heading south and then west.

Poetto Beach, Sardinia, Italy