Porto Giunco and Villasimius

Porto Giunco   

Our overnight sail to Cagliari ended with us diverting, 20 miles short of the city, to the southeast corner of Sardinia. As we motored along, we saw on the chart that there are marine reserve areas in the area and the bays just looked lovely. With a light southerly wind forecast for the afternoon we picked Porto Giunco as the bay most likely to give us the best shelter from any swell and it turned out to be fabulous.

The whole bay is sand and so in the bright summer sun the sea glowed turquoise. It was so clear and blue that it felt as though we had anchored in a swimming pool.

Underwater, BV’s arrival brought much interest to the fish. We had a large shoal of them around us for all of our stay in the bay. We swam and barbecued; it was the perfect way to relax after the passage.

Replacing a guard rail bolt   

There was no wind overnight and BV turned sideways onto the very slight swell. You could barely see it but there was enough to set up a roll which disturbed our sleep on 12^th June. Not what we wanted after an overnight passage.

We rang the marinas at Cagliari to work out where we would go when we got there but we were enjoying our time at anchor so much that we decided to stay out of the city another night. There was lots of food on board and we were in no rush but there was just the issue of the swell. However, for that we had a plan, and it involved moving around to another sheltered bay on the south side of the peninsula.

Laundry – the most photogenic of the day’s jobs!   

The 13^th therefore became a maintenance and chores day. There were lots of little jobs that had built up and we set about tackling them. Because there was a perfect drying wind Nicky started a mammoth clothes wash. Whilst the outside of BV was turning into a colourful clothes line, I hid down below. The head on one of the bolts securing a safety rail bracket to the toerail had sheared off. This was probably a mixture of crevice corrosion and enthusiastic but poorly trained sailors pushing on the guard rails when they came alongside; guard rails are simply not strong enough for pushing boats apart! The bolt had to be removed and replaced which involved working in the confines of the back of a locker in the aft cabin. With no obstructions, the job would have taken less that 5 minutes but then it was a job on a yacht and there are always obstructions and normally you have to be a double-jointed dwarf to fit the available space. Happily, this job wasn’t that bad but access for the spanner was poor which meant turning the bolt in a seemingly never ending series of ¼ turns until eventually the whole length was drawn out. Three minutes later the new bolt was secured on a bead of sealant. I replaced a missing wooden plug covering a screw on the cockpit sole and then I climbed into the machinery space to work on the generator. Despite having fitted a non-return valve in the water inlet pipe earlier this season, we have continued to have problems with airlocks preventing cooling water from getting to the generator. As a result, I re-ran the inlet pipe taking out a bend, some oddball connections and a length of wider pipe; it seems to have done the trick and the generator self-primed, as it should, on start-up.

Porto Giunco   

With lots of jobs ticked off our list it was time to turn our thoughts to where we would anchor for the night. Porto Giunco, with its swimming pool like water, had been a great place to spend the day but we wanted to make sure that we had a smooth anchorage overnight.

Villas on Capo Carbonara   

So, at 1600 we lifted our anchor and motored south between the small islands and rocky outcrops, past the lighthouse on Capo Carbonara and around the corner into the bay on the other side of the peninsula. All the way around we saw lots of very nice looking villas and even the ruins of an old castle.

Villasimius bay   

Turning into Villasimius Bay we saw that several other yachts had decided to anchor here too. There is a marina at Villasimius so we picked a spot away more than 200 metres from the entrance and more than 300 metres from the beaches to be legal. It was very pleasant, not quite as nice as Porto Giunco but jolly nice all the same. Best of all, it was like a millpond overnight! So, nice that we spent another day and another night here ticking off most of the jobs on our to-do list. But, by 15 June it was definitely time to think about moving on and so we left Capo Carbonara behind us and headed west towards Cagliari.

Villasimius bay   

Porto Giunco and Villasimius, Sadinia, Italy