Dear friends,

The last two weeks has been busy but I've achieved the next milestone by sailing across from France to Corsica. I'm sitting in a swaying boat on a mooring outside Calvi, the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, which has a magnificent citadel standing high above the town.

I sailed solo from Cap D'Agde to Port Camargue, on the edge of the Rhone estuary to meet my new crew Margaret and it turned out that Donna had got bored with Crete and decided to come back the same day to do a few days' sailing before going off to a friend who has a cottage near Beziers. They arrived within an hour of each other on a bus which dropped them off to 1/2 km of the boat. Port Camargue is more up-market than Cap D'Agde but has the same marina facilities so I could finish off some of the work that needed doing on the boat.

We set off next day rather too late to get right across the Rhone estuary despite suitable southerly winds and stopped off in Port Guardian, which is next to Stes Maries de la Mer, a delightful old town which hosts a major festival of gypsies in May, whose patron saint (a black Mary) is buried there. All  the other biblical Mary's are supposed to have landed up there too. The next day we completed the sail across the estuary to Carro, a little fishing village on the Cote Bleu, and not a moment too soon. The forecasts were predicting a force 7 Mistral the next day. This is the feared wind that roars down the Rhone valley with little warning at gale force and in the worst spots is blowing 20% of days in the year. So we sat in Carro while the wind whistled down the calanque (a steep-sided limestone valley) on our head-to mooring.

Mooring like this is very common in the Med and one of the things I've been worred about the single-handed sailing. In fact it's not so hard when you get used to it, particularly in its other variant, the stern-to mooring. I haven't yet tried it single-handed but there are nearly always some friendly people around on the quay to take or throw a mooring rope so it shouldn't be impossible. The key to this method is a chain which is anchored well out and that you pick up from the quay and attach to stern or bows as the case may be. But you don't have to do that until you're firmly attached to the quai and since the Med doesn't have much in the way of tides this isn't so much of a problem.

We did a short sail next day to another port along the Cote, Carry le Rouet as the wind wasn't so bad in the afternoon and Donna left from the station early the next morning. Later on, I took the train in the opposite direction to a Yanmar agent in Martigues to get a new water pump for the engine which had been leaking badly for the last few days. But communication wasn't perfect and it turned out that they thought I wanted the impeller, a small rubber device which is the core of the pump but of which I had several spares. However the impellers I had wouldn't fit, so at least they supplied another make which would and we could carry on with a leaky pump.

By now the Mistral was blowing itself out and the next day we set off across the Gulf of Marseille and had a magnificent sail down to the Cap Croisette. Shortly after this the wind died altogether but we continued until we arrived in Port Miou, the most delightful calanque just west of Cassis which I remembered vividly from a visit a few years ago. We found a place to moor in one the yacht clubs that operate the port and as the sun went down a flautist in a boat on the other side of the clanque entertained us with some beautiful playing.

The next day we made it to Bandol, a typical big French resort which claimed to have 3 Yanmar agents, and where we had arranged to meet the next two crew: Marc and Matt, who are delightful 20-something year olds from Poole who have an ambition to cross the Atlantic by sail. They'd sailed a couple of times with me before and called up to see how I was getting on in the Med and got quickly enrolled. Apart from disappearing most nights to local discos till 4 to 6 in the morning, which means they are sleeping most of the day, they've been a great addition. Even Margaret who was very skeptical before they arrived, has been charmed. So I sent Matt straight up the mast to fix some problems (he's a lot lighter than me) and managed to get the water  pump fixed rather than renewed tho that meant we had an extra night in Bandol, which delighted the lads.

Our next call was to anchor off the island of Porquerolles which I remember fondly from a visit a few years back. It's a nature reserve and the tourists pour over in the morning on the ferry and are gone by night. To have your own boat is about the only way to stay and we had to shoehorn our way into an anchorage position. I'd have loved to have stayed several days but the forecast for the next day to cross to Corsica was perfect (SW 3-4) and afterwards got worse. So the next day we set off and did it in 25 hours, of which 15 was sailing and the rest had motor assistance.

Today (Sunday) is a quiet day spent sight-seeing and swimming and tomorrow we set off for the northern tip of Corsica to go round it and further east to Italy.

The weeks in September  in Greece appear to be filling up with crew and maybe one for October too. I have a gap at the moment getting from Italy to Corfu which has to be filled. So the voyage of Second Wind continues...

love
Chris