Capo Sant'AmpelioBordighera
borderlineexposed head-on to the swell today (city-level)
- window
- From sunset to sunrise spearfishing is prohibited (DPR 1639/1968, art. 129): the window is entirely a daytime one. The timing here is set by law rather than by convenience: sunrise to sunset and nothing else. Carrying your papers costs nothing and settles everything. The buoy lines marking off the beaches are a legal reference, not a suggestion.
- tide
- The typical range on this stretch is between twenty and forty centimetres: it opens no passages and closes none. In the Mediterranean the tide is not the figure that decides the day, and it is better to know that before going looking for tables. Do not wait for the right tide: wait for the right sea. The best moment is the one when the sea is flat, not the one written in the table.
- shelter
- A headland is never sheltered on both flanks at once: one face takes it and the other stays in the lee, and the day is decided by which of the two is looking at today's swell. The shore in front of the mark faces southwest, about 246°, so everything arriving from that sector gets in unobstructed. Shelter is verified in the water and not on the chart: the first fifty metres already tell you how the rest will be. A sheltered stretch is not a safe stretch: it only changes which risk you are facing.
- conditions
- The bottom drops straight away: the 10 m contour runs about 170 m out and the 20 m contour 190 m. The good day here is not made by the depth but by the water: if you can see, you can work in five metres. If the water gets worse while you are out, head for land rather than along the coast. An offshore wind cleans, an onshore wind muddies: it holds here as it does along the whole coast.
- hazard
- The surface marker is compulsory: a float with a red flag and a white diagonal stripe, visible at 300 m, and you may not go more than 50 m from the vertical below it. On a headland the risk is not the depth but the swell that comes round the corner without warning. A day given up is never a mistake. Cramp comes at the worst moment: come out before you need to.
- access
- Access on a headland is nearly always on foot over rock: short but awkward, with loose stone right down to the water. The mark sits about 40 m from the coastline: the useful water starts practically under the shore. Do not leave your gear where the swell can take it. The last stretch back to land, 40 m, is always done with less breath than you expected.
Low rocky cape, slabs and posidonia; sea bream and gilthead, the point breaks the westerly swell.
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