15 Aug 06 - 16 Aug 06 - On our way to Corsica

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Our original plan was to go to North Sardinia, but as the schedule slided significantly we were looking at possibly go to south Sardinia instead as it would shorten the trip somewhat.

However as we discovered, Sardinia have made some, in my opinion, stupid rules, that every vessel longer than 14m that arrive in a Sardinian harbour would have to pay a tax of no less than Euro 1000. Our vessel would be in the length category of Euro 2000, but as its a sailing vessel we would get a 50% discount.

In any case, Im certainly not willing to pay such ridiculous amounts of money just to enter a harbour (mind you this is in addition to the normal harbour fees!).

So other options was looked at, like going to Tunis or simply to stay with the original route, except to go in harbour in Corsica instead of Gallura on Sardinia.

As Tunis is not in EU, lots of additional paperworks could/would be required. Going there might not be too problematic as things are taken care of on the docks, but visiting an EU harbour afterwards would require significant customs involvements, so Tunis was also ruled out.

Hence we are almost back to our original plan, except that instead of mooring in Gallura, we will visit Bonifacio on Corsica (which is French territory... gulp... didnt expect to moore in France so havnt got a French guest flag... well we will probably survive that ;)).

The stay in Messina was quite stressful as we were all the time hit by smaller, but significant waves that made Dimitris roll heavily from side to side, and at times almost ride on the floating pier, which resulted in some scratches and lots of frustration from my side :)

Messina as a city is actually quite nice... except if you want to shop between 13:00 and 17:00 where everything (and I mean everything) is closed. We could only find a barbershop to get a haircut in that period. I would however not recommend any largish vessels to moore in the marina due to two things: its size... it is very small and manouvering in there is not easy with winds pressing the vessel, and the damned floating piers which was giving us endless amounts of frustrations.

Departing from Messina, we had to look for another pier, about 1nm North of the marina, to refuel. Be carefull with vessels sticking deep as there is only about 3.3m of water (rising very fast to nothing) in the deepest end of the refuling pier (which is actually a normal gasstation for cars with a pier attached to it). We refueled without any major problems though. The main tanks took 257 liters of diesel, and the generator 25 liters. As we previously had completely filled up the tanks we were now able to calculate how our fuel consumption is:

Main engine at approx. 1900 revs/min giving us about 6.5knots use 9 liters of fuel per hour.

Generator use about 0.6 liters of fuel per hour (with our level of cooking and electricity consumption).

We estimate that we have approx. 700 liters of diesel fuel for the main engine and approx 200 liters for the generator.

At the time of writing this, we are at position 39N40.37, 12E57.73 and thus about halfways to Corsica. We have been going for engine most of the way as there has been almost no wind. I hope we will get some wind shortly as going by engine is not only expensive... its also rather noisy.

Nikolai and Soeren have been busy during the evening taking sun setting pictures of the island of Lipari which is a volcano island.

Kim

 

Corse 1	Corse 2	Corse 3	Corse 4	Corse 5
Corse 6	Corse 7	Corse 8 Preparing dinner