Cruising the Amalfi Coast

DSC_0047, originally uploaded by travis_prowell.

I gave some Italian lady a copy of my CA driver's license and a 10 euro deposit, and she gave me a boat. Amazingly she never asked if I had even driven a boat before which, of course, I haven't. Her son did give me a few brief instructions regarding the specifics of the boat, and something about the gas tanks, but sadly I don't really speak Italian. I did manage to understand that you should take the wake from large cruise ships and yachts at an angle (which actually came in useful several times).

The harbor was an insane traffic jam of multi-million dollar yachts, ferries, and us, but by 11:15am we were out and fighting for position along the coast. Amazingly there are few beaches here as it is mostly cliffs crashing into the sea, and often when a beach does appear it is hard to tell the beach from the umbrellas. By noon we had slipped into a small cove which was towered over by a castle on one side, and a large cave on the other. The water here was perfect in clarity and temperature.

We pulled out of the cove and made our way past Positano, which we didn't even try to go to as the harbor looked twice as insane s Amalfi's. Not far after Positano the coast becomes more rugged with very little human intrusion (on land at least). The number of boats lightened up, too. Jackie eventually got seasick and we had to drop anchor and make for land on a small rocky beach in the middle of nowhere (we had bought a tiny inflatable raft just for this purpose. We spent over an hour here swimming and getting some sun. When we got back to the boat to head on, we weren't able to get the anchor up. It had gotten stuck in the crevace of some rocks and was completely unmovable. We finally gave up after a rugged Italian seaman and his topless wife couldn't even get it free, leaving us little hope of doing it ourselves. So we cut the line headed out to sea to zip around the islands before heading home with some brief stops to jump from the boat and pee.

When we got back to shore the Italian lady wasn't all that surprised about the anchor, and she only charged us $30 for it, and even apologized that she had to!

A few more days of this and then we'll see you all back home!

here's a link to the photos we managed to take