We made it into Italian waters on Saturday June 1st after a good sail from Umag. Crossing the Gulf of Trieste was quite hazardous with lots of floating logs and tree parts around, presumably washed down the Italian rivers. It gets quite shallow in the northern most part of the Gulf and acts as an anchorage to many ships waiting to go into the port of Trieste, so we navigated around quite an array of vessels to find the small buoys marking the channel into Porto Buso, which was the gateway to the Lagoon and eventually mainland Italy.
The flat rough ribbon of land that was Porto Buso was littered with a few trees and a couple of derelict buildings and beyond this the lagoon stretched three or four miles across to the actual mainland of Italy. It was surreal motoring through the narrow channel, dredged to about 6 metres with the surrounding water being very shallow indeed. Channels across the lagoon, marked with red and green buoys were actually signposted…Grado and Trieste one way, Murano the other. We went straight across and into the River that led us up to Cantieri Marina San Giorgio, where Sunbeam yachts have their yard.
It was all very rural in one direction but we passed ship yards and signs of industrial activity in another before reaching the Marina and finding ourselves a berth to tie into. We were faced with stern-to moorings with tall posts which Mo had to lasso ropes onto to hold the bow! Nigel moored up perfectly but Deja Vu had to breathe in as the berth was obviously meant for less beamy boats. Ashore we found very little English was spoken by the locals so were grateful to meet Gigi in the Marina restaurant who helped us with some of the translations. We had to wait until Monday for Pierre Angelo to turn up for work to get any sense at all out of the Marina officials, as fortunately for us he spoke quite good English. We feel as if we have discovered the only other nation with the same application for language learning as the English!
We have met a lot of other Sunbeam boat owners as it is a very popular and convenient place for the Swiss, Germans and Austrians to keep their boats, being only a three or four hour drive to their homes. We were even invited to a German couple’s launch party for their shiny new Sunbeam 42 which took place on the same pontoon we were on. Champagne and canapes at 1600 was very pleasant!
We have been here now for 4 days and return to UK on Wednesday 5th June. We have noticed a stark contrast between what we have been used to in Croatia and what we find in this relatively sleepy Marina. Admittedly they are not used to visitors, especially not English ones, but there is a very ‘demani’ attitude where nothing seems to matter. How this contrasts with the relatively teutonic approach of the Croatians!
The marina has a pleasant swimming pool which was very welcome after the bike ride into the town of San Giorgio, about 4 km away. The purpose was to replace an empty gas bottle. A mission duly accomplished after a few wrong turns.
We are here in San Giorgio for Sunbeam to replace the rigging on Deja Vu II whilst we return home for a couple of weeks. At last on Tuesday Manfred from Sunbeam yachts duly appeared and confidence that the rigging job might eventually get done improved. Time will tell, we leave tomorrow for home!
Deja Vu 
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