Sailing

After our amazing trip this past weekend we had to come back to reality and had a lecture from Stefano Milia about remediation techniques. We ultimately learned that there is no correct solution when remediating a particular site, we will always have to weigh our options between the cost and overall safety of the solution.

To change it up a bit, we spent Tuesday morning in a J24 sailboat out in the harbor of Cagliari. My boat’s instructor was Andrea. He was around thirty years old and was a special education teacher at a school on the north side of Cagliari. During his time off from school he plays the violin for an international orchestra and captains charter sail boats. While on board with him we got our six person teams to practice our tacks and jibes. Luckily no one was hit by the boom as it came around on each maneuver. By the time we were coming back into the dock the thermal winds had picked up so we decided to try our turns at more of a race pace where we would pull the jib sheets through the winch as fast as we possible could. After all of the hard work we all spent the rest of the day at the nearby beach.

We changed gears again for Wednesday and went to visit the Villaservice facility in Villacidro. There they landfilled municipal solid, and special waste. In addition to that, they digested the organic fraction of waste so that they could produce and burn biogas. Landfill gas was also produced and collected and burned for energy at a different end of the plant, where as the biogas from the digester was used to warm itself and to supply energy for the waste water treatment plant so that they could clean all of the waste water that was generated from the plant in all of its various processes. The plant also had a composting facility to deal with the more fibrous fraction of organic waste and then that could be reused by farmers as fertilizer.

Once again, we had another couple of amazing days in the delightful island of Sardegna.