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weekend trip to italy

in a previous posting, i mentioned that i was heading off to the lago di garda to go sailing. here’s the bloggy bit about that.

saturday, 29/8/09

while waiting at the motorway services, the low clouds were drifting in over the hillside and getting themselves caught in the trees. it was also slowly getting light, which allowed me to grab the above available light snap of the mist. oh, and the ugly petrol station too (to give the whole thing some context…). andi, gisela & julian (their 11-yr old son) turned up with graffiti in tow, filled up the tank and then off over the brenner motorway to italy. along the way, we stopped for a coffee and a bite of breakfast somewhere north of rovereto. after leaving the motorway, we headed down the east shore of the lake to aquafresca. at aquafresca, first order was more coffee, and then we started working on setting graffiti up:

paolo and josef (and renate) turned up to help:

we then managed to get graffiti on the hook and in the water:

after watering graffiti, and taking her out to the mooring buoy, we had to go and register for the race on sunday. sounds easy, but the race office was in bogliaco on the other side of the lake. easiest way to get there was by ferry:

after registering and having a quick drink at CVG, the yacht club hosting the trofeo di gorla and the centomiglia races, we decided to drive back to aquafresca around the north shore of the lake. on the way, i dozed off a bit, but when i woke up, a storm had started brewing and coming in from the north:

we had originally considered stopping in riva for dinner, but there were so many tourists, all of whom were stood in lines for restaurants, we decided to carry on to somewhere near malcesine. when we stopped briefly in torbole to discuss dinner options, i grabbed this cool picture of the ferry coming in:

as it was renate’s birthday—which she tried to keep secret—she had to have a birthday cake, so andi organised a tiramisu with a candle:

sunday, 30/8/09

on sunday, we had another early start, left the hotel at 05:45 and were taken out to graffiti at 06:10 by aquafresca’s friendly bosun, ivan. we motored over to bogliaco, arriving in time to rig up the sails before the race started at 08:30. the start was more of a general consensus than a “real” regatta start—at about 08:30, all the boats started their beat northwards over the line, when the whole fleet was about 50m over the line, the starting boat raced past, thus officially starting the race. the gorla and the cento have hundreds of boats starting at the same time in different classes, which makes the start rather stressful and the race tactics fairly difficult.

the course was bogliaco—torbole—aquafresca—bogliaco, so with a strong northerly to contend with, we were on a beat to reach torbole. after about 1hr, andi decided to change the genua for a jib, some time later, the wind had slackened off, so we went back to the genua. this decision probably cost us a better place in our class, but it seemed to be the right decision at the time. shortly before we got to torbole, the wind died and then came back, albeit from the south. we hoisted the spinnaker and reached down to the first buoy, rounding it in 3rd place at 12:11 (yes, that’s 3h41m after the start). joy of joys, we got to beat back to bogliaco via aquafresca. all the way to aquafresca and then on to bogliaco we were fighting out 3rd–5th places with ITA 1400 and ITA 1162, we ended up finishing 5th after 7h09m of sailing, only 7.5min after the winner in our class. we reached back to aquafresca under spinnaker and munched on the rest of our sandwiches and enjoyed the sun and wind. 11 hours after getting on the boat, we were on the mooring and ivan picked us up again.

it was my first time sailing on the lago di garda, and it was definitely an interesting experience. the lago di garda is not like any other lakes. the storm on saturday night had kicked up a horrendous chop, which is not at all like the waves you get at sea. i felt a bit queasy to begin with, but that may have been due to the fact that some of saturday’s evening meal wasn’t agreeing with my digestive system. it was a long day all in all, but i’d do it again. next time, i’ll try not to get sunburn legs though…

pictures

here’s the album of all the pictures. i was snapshotting most of saturday, so there are no “serious” pictures in this lot. most of the pictures of the storm brewing were taken out of a moving car, so i didn’t have the chance to compose them as well as i might have done if we hadn’t been driving. sunday, i did have the camera on board, but it was too wet and due to the beat, it was too busy to take any pictures. bit of a pity really, but the sailing was great fun. and i think i’d much rather have been sailing than taking pictures.