Strangely enough, this story about chartering a sailboat in the Mediterranean started with a hack for the ever-increasing cost of a summer rental in Montauk.
For the past 20 years, my husband, Alex , and I—West Coast transplants and die-hard beach people—have spent a ridiculous amount of money to rent a mildewing summer house on the tip of Long Island. Last spring, reality in the form of a Brooklyn mortgage set in, and we took a bye on the beach rental. We thought this was a brilliant cheat until, about to make an offer on a beautiful s Hinckley sloop, we did the sobering math on the cost of winterizing, launching, mooring, and inevitable repairs.
Still, months of searching the Yacht World website and driving around the mid-Atlantic looking at boats had planted a watery daydream in our minds.
We decided to make a trip of it. After polling friends, travel specialists , and charter companies, we landed on Corsica and Sardinia —rocky, marquis-covered islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea, bound by mainland France and Italy on the north and east, North Africa on the south, and Spain on the west. Fantastic swimming and snorkeling, and plenty of private spots for basking, at Tahiti beach on Caprera island in the Maddalena archipelago.
We made a rough plan to pick up the boat in the town of Sari-Solenzara on the east coast of Corsica, a French island that could have just as easily ended up Italian. Its most famous native son was Buonaparte before he became Bonaparte; meanwhile, Corsican, which much of the population still speaks, is closer to medieval Tuscan than to French. This seemed a refreshingly—and a tad frighteningly—loose agenda.
