It was to be a long trip from Ponza to the northern coast of Sardinia. We departed at 0810 from Ponza an expected it to take 25 hours overnight to get there. The winds slowly built behind us and were blowing 27 plus knots from 0500 onwards.

We sailed a quarter of the way and had the auto pilot on all the way. In the middle of the night we were hailed seemingly by the Italian navy letting us know that we were in a live firing zone. Whaaaatt??? Not knowing where the zone was or if we we even in it we kept on going. I could not think that they would conduct live firing exercises in the middle of the night anyway.

At midnight we noticed that the head and cabin lights didn’t work. The service battery was reading 12.3 volts. Almost dead! We started the engine to charge the battery and soon also picked up some speed. Got caught in a lightning storm with big waves and furled the genoa. This slowed us down and it was becoming not a relaxing passage. The wind turned and the waves reversed. And the last 4 hours to Caprera was a bash the whole way with slamming that shook the boat and slowed us down considerably. Arrived at 1240 with engine at 1860 hours and anchored in clay that didn’t hold well at all.

A boat on a mooring ball left and we quickly upped anchor to grab it. We really needed to be securely anchored so that we could sleep well at night as we were expecting 30 plus knots winds for the next three days. With those sort of winds we didn’t think we would be moving.

The expected wind turned into be something very dangerous to the north of us on Corsica.

More of that later.