The Yacht Week Sardinia Day 1 – Olbia Base Marina & Portisco

by Calvin Sun | Sep 4, 2021 | How's the weather?, Italy, Sardinia, September 2021: The Tyrrhenian Sea, The Nightlife

The first day of Yacht Week’s first official voyage to Sardinia & Corsica: a frenzy of check-ins, security deposits, last minute provisional shopping, under 2 flash thunderstorms…aka the not so fun stuff.

But we already would know all this: After 3 orientations over the past month, we had managed our expectations enough to make sure we were all ready for the drama (except for the weather).

Even so, the sweet is never as sweet without the sour.

Checking out from La Residenze del Centro at 10:30am we walked over to set up our temporary home base at Café Gregorio by the marina, who graciously allowed all 33 of us to hole up there from 11am-5pm (the tip helped).

Then as prepared as we could be, it felt as if Hurricane Ida back home would still chase after us and throw a wrench into our carefully laid out plans: 2 flash flood storms that struck in Olbia were so awful that even cockroaches scurried for shelter in our bags at the café. While it’s already stressful enough to coordinate the 33 of us to fly out in the middle of tornadoes, flash floods, and hurricanes back home, seeing flash floods and cockroaches scurrying for their lives here reminded us that you can’t outrun Mother Nature.

Yet we were still the lucky ones; while all of us stayed safely and dry under the café’s rain cover the whole day (while I ran over to the marina checking in with Eric’s dinky umbrella), only leaving to make quick trips to the grocery store in between storms, I saw everyone else outside The Monsoon Diaries’ crew in Yacht Week running around and getting soaked at a coverless marina.

Finally by 5pm, our homes for the next week were ready:

Dodging hurricanes and tornadoes at home, flights being subsequently delayed or redirected, 2 of us missing and rebooking flights, long lines, long layovers, 2 more storms waiting for us at Olbia, last minute ATM runs, last minute grocery shopping, and fighting off cockroaches, we finally made it:

Outmaneuvering some initial (and expected) awkward drama in choosing our rooms, we then took an hour to store our food, stock the cabinets, make our beds, and even decorate our yacht to celebrate Ann’s birthday.

…all with this sunset as our backdrop:

We then got dressed up, donned our face coverings and at 7:45pm drove up 20 minutes to Matt’s Restaurant in Portisco:

It’s all 33 of us together finally (with 1 more joining us on Monday!)…

…cheering to the beginning of the “best week of our lives”:

Let’s just say we were the pink elephant in the room and the largest contingency of any other group in Yacht Week: we’d take the largest table of the night. Multiple crews from other yachts would come to our table to say hi, and kept asking how we managed to get so many to come to the same voyage at once.

Our collective answer: it’s the monsoon baby. Get ready for us.

Throwing an impromptu shirtless outdoor dance party during dinner, we eventually returned to our yachts at 1am for even more impromptu parties on our yachts.

And yet as much fun as they would be, we eventually had to establish boundaries by kicking a few folks off one of our yachts for passing out in the back (and some even swiping a few drinks from our fridge)…which I think they all still took pretty well as without complaint they simply moved on to the yacht next door.

Thanks for not being difficult and apologies ahead that we didn’t buy enough alcohol to accommodate for outside guests; it’s only the first day!

- At time of posting in Olbia, it was 27 °C - Humidity: 62% | Wind Speed: 27km/hr | Cloud Cover: thunderstorms, flash floods