Thu 9 Aug

Having gone from never having done a single pull-up to doing significantly more than that, my shoulder is not happy. It’s worse in the mornings, but on the plus side it means I’m straight out of bed when I wake up so this morning we were up at 08:00.

People have recommended walking to the lighthouse on Santa Maria so we got in the dinghy and went ashore, pleased be to out before it got too hot, and the masses arrived. The 5km round trip took us along the coast down a narrow footpath lined with bushes and full of numerous flying, jumping and running insects and a small snake. After 25mins we reached the lighthouse which looked like it’d seen better days. It was covered in broken rusted scaffolding making it was difficult to see who was holding who up. A project which ran out of funding most likely. We turned, headed back and came back to the boat.

Having been inspired by this drone photo of the bay, I needed to see if we could recreate it. Yes, a trip up the mast – much to Tom’s delight! Being simply the most awesome, understanding and patient guy around he humoured me and winched me up. As soon as my feet left the deck though I regretted it. The rocking of the boat is accentuated the higher up you go and by the time I was 3/4 of the way up I was clinging on for dear life, and felt pretty bloody terrified. Just about managing to take a few lightening fast photos I was soon back on two feet, quivering. One of my favourite pieces of advice is, “Do one thing every day that scares you”. This was it. ?

For the rest of the day I sat on deck watching the continuous comings and goings of the hundreds of boats. It’s really quite entertaining. ? Tomorrow the plan is to be off out early and get around the east side of Sardinia to avoid the Mistral which us due to be blowing from Saturday until Sunday.