Italy Trip!!!

Ok... I'm quite bad with the daily blogging thing. The beginning of this month we set out on our, what was supposed to be, two week Italy Cruise with our sister ship. We started in Monaco, then went to San Remo, Portofino, Vernere, Rapallo and then arrived back in Beaulieu before heading back.

San Remo: San Remo was our first stop. The port there was quite big and the town was also massive, and o celebrate our first day in Italy... we had some beers at a strip club at 1am of course!! First strip club I'd been to... and was not too bad... would've been better if the beers didn't cost R100... not that I paid for it anyway. lol. Anyway... that was the highlight of San Remo.

Portofino: Portofino is basically the St Tropez of Italy. It is a very small port built into the mountains, with a castle and few other buildings surrounding it. The place is absolutely stunning!! However it was quite rocky, and since the wives don't like being on board when the boat rocks, we put the table and chairs on the dock and cracked a few bottles of wine before heading off to bed that night. Drinking expensive wine from crystal glasses with the boss and family... DEFINITELY one of the best things so far. I also did a bit of fishing with a net and caught a fish!!! Well two fish actually!! Other than that I went up in the morning to go see the Castle and had the best Capppuccino ever!! Italians definitely know how to make cappuccinos!!!

Vernere: The most interesting part of the trip... We spent two nights in Vernere, where we wondered around, checked out all the restaurants and watched the hundreds of Italian girls sun bathing in tiny bikini's on the breakwall behind our boat! The weather however was turning for the worst, so we thought we'd go to Elba before the storm hits and wait out the storm there... however.... we managed to get stuck tight in the middle of the storm!!! Awesome!!! Hadley's captain, Greg, and the owner's nephew, Harry, and I went on Hadley, while the other two families were on Chocolat. Since Chocolat was the bigger boat they reckoned it would be better... but with 4m waves and 30knot winds, neither boat was good. An hour into the trip and having been tossed around the whole way, the storm suddenly picked up and we ended up ramping the waves!! The first time it happened i was filming Chocolat out the back of the boat, since chocolat was following us, and was suddenly thrown into the air as our boat went over the top of the wave at 20 knots and hit the floor hard as the boat flew off the wave and landed on the sea again!!! The feeling of being airborne was awesome!!!! Well after this happening twice more, the families in Chocolat decided we had to turn around, since almost everyone was sea sick. Due to that day, the wives weren't keen to travel on to Corsica and Sardinia, and so we spent another night in Vernere.

Rapollo: Instead of carrying on our journey, we started to head back, and stopped in Rapollo for two days. The port was amazing!! It was in a big town, where there was loads of shopping for the girls and the water in the port was as smooth as glass!! Needless to say they were loving it, and the second night there they decided to take the boat out on it's first night cruise to Portofino/ When they left, i was given the tender and had to pick up Greg from the town and then race over to meet them at Portofino before they got into port. As luck would have it... Greg was running a bit late, so by the time we left Rapallo, the only thing I could do was hit full throttle the whole way to Portofino!!!!:):) 45knots in a little tender over bumpy water... what could be better!?!?! We arrived as they were going into the port and greg hoppen on Chocolat to help them moor while the two families got off to go to dinner. Once the families were off, Chocolat left to anchor just outside the port while I was left to grab pizza and bring it back to Chocolat by tender. This is when things got interesting... The tender wouldn't start when I tried to leave the port to go to Chocolat... so after several minutes I managed to hook up a tow out to Chocolat. Once on Chocolat the two captains and I ate the Pizzas before checking out the tender. Greg's an engineer, so we were pretty confident he could get it to work... however the problem was not too easy to solve. Since the night was still young... we thought we'd pop over to Rapallo quick and swap the tenders and be back before the families had finished dinner... however half way back the boss phoned and said they were finished. So we turned around quickly and started back. The plan had been to pick them up by tender and chauffeur them back to chocolat... however, now that the tender was broken, we would have to pick them up with Chocolat. (Picking up a bunch of passengers from a small port on a big boat on it's first night cruise is not an ideal thing to do!!) Luckily we never had to do that though... because as we turned the boat around to go pick them up... one of the engines started giving off warning alarms! Turns out the oil and gearbox level was low, and the turblos were over heating! Total disaster!! Luckily we had another engine!! Anyway... we had to phone the boss and let him know it was not possible for us to pick him up, and so we limped back to Rapallo while they caught the ferry. We found out the next day that nothing was wrong with the engines though, and that it was all a default with the sensors!!!

From Rapallo we entered back into France and stopped at Beaulieu before heading home... It was definitely an amazing week of travelling!!!