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The Archipelago de Maddalena is a beautiful cluster of islands, with the two biggest ones, La Maddalena and Isola Caprera, connected by a dam. There is a ferry from Palau to the stunning town La Maddalena on the main island and when the Mistral finally took a break we used the opportunity and set over. There were just a handful of cars on the ferry and on the winding roads on the islands we barely met another soul. Without the wind the winter sun gave us a little bit of warmth and we cruised around, soaking up the incredible beauty of the island and recovering from the past stormy days.
We returned to our home base at Porto Pollo the next day and with us, the Mistral returned too. And it returned in full vigour. Ma smallest sail was a 4.0 and it was way too big. The self-build 3.3 still challenged us with its obstinacy and so it was once again hauling ass into Hail Mary jibes. Handling this was a bit easier on the leeward side of the dam but even there these way too soft plastic fins demanded a very sensible back foot to avoid spectacular spinouts.
As far as I remember, the wind kept blowing until the day we had to leave. This time we were smarter and took our sleeping bags on board of the ferry end spent the nightly crossing on deck, sleeping on the banks. Big surprise when we woke up at dawn, shortly before we reached Genoa. It was snowing and the coastal mountains were plain white. So were the autostradas and we had a last challenge, navigating in between all these local drivers, who obviously never had seen any snow before.
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