4-Day Gulf of Naples Sailing Itinerary: Procida, Ischia & Capri

The Third Kind of Italian Week

We have now sailed three Italian cruising grounds on this site, and the interesting thing is that each one is constrained by something different.

In La Maddalena, the rules decide: night anchoring is banned park-wide outside the authority's buoys, so your overnights are buoy nights and the alarm radius drops to forty metres. In the Aeolians, the wind decides: there is no all-weather anchorage in the archipelago, every stop is open to at least three sectors, and the week is an order of islands rather than a schedule.

Here, neither applies. There is no single park permit. The shelter is decent, the distances are trivial and the forecast is usually benign. What decides your day instead is how many other boats got there first — and that is a genuinely different skill, because it rewards leaving early rather than reading a barometer.

Every Stop on One Screen

Read down the “open to” column and you will notice something the Aeolians never offered: three of these five are sheltered from four or five sectors, and the two islands you actually sleep on are open only to the south and west. That is why this bay forgives beginners. What it does not forgive is arriving late.

Day 1 — Baia to Procida (7 nm)

Start where almost nobody starts. Baia, in the Campi Flegrei at the north-west corner of the bay, sits over the Parco Sommerso di Baia — a Roman resort town that subsided beneath the sea and is now a zoned marine protected area you can snorkel over. Anchoring is restricted or replaced by buoys in the inner zones; read the zone map before you drop, because this is one of the few places in the bay where the constraint genuinely is a rulebook.

Then seven miles: south past Bacoli, round Capo Miseno, and across to Procida. Anchor at Chiaiolella on the south-west side, in 3–8 m over sand and mud, with good holding and shelter from north right round to south-east. It is the best anchorage in this guide and the shallowest, which is why its alarm radius is the smallest at 80 m.

Procida is the one island in the bay that has not been rebuilt for visitors. Corricella — the stacked pastel harbour you have seen in photographs — is a ten-minute walk and still a working fishing village at seven in the morning.

Day 2 — Procida to Ischia (8 nm)

A short hop west across the channel to the big island, and round to Sant'Angelo on the south coast: 5–15 m over sand and volcanic gravel, good holding, sheltered from east through north-west and open to the south and west. The village sits behind a tombolo — a sand spit tying a rock islet to the island — and there are no cars.

This is also where the bay starts teaching you its lesson about depth. Sant'Angelo deepens fast off the beach, and the difference between anchoring in 6 m and 14 m is the difference between a 60 m alarm circle and a 100 m one. Work in towards the shallow water rather than dropping at the outer edge in fifteen metres because it was empty — that space is empty for a reason. The arithmetic is in our guide to anchor scope.

If the wind has any south in it, Sant'Angelo is untenable and the answer is the other side of the island — the same one-sided-shelter move the Aeolians demand, just with more choices.

Day 3 — Ischia to Capri to Sorrento (29 nm)

The long day, and the one that needs an alarm clock rather than a forecast. Nineteen miles south-east across the mouth of the bay to Capri, passing west of the island and round to Marina Piccola under the Faraglioni.

Be clear-eyed about Capri. It is spectacular, and as an anchorage it is the weakest stop on this route: 4–15 m over sand and rock with only fair holding, sheltered from north through west and wide open to the south, with much of the usable water taken by mooring buoys, restricted zones around the Faraglioni and the Blue Grotto, and a shelf that drops away almost immediately. Come for the middle of the day, swim, look at the rocks, and go. Planning to sleep here is how people end up motoring to Sorrento at ten at night.

So build that into the plan rather than discovering it: ten miles east and north to Piano di Sorrento, sheltered from south through west, open to the north, deep at 5–20 m, and directly beneath the ferry routes. Not a beautiful anchorage. A reliable one.

Day 4 — Sorrento to Baia (18 nm)

Straight back across the bay, with Vesuvius on your starboard quarter for most of it and the whole Neapolitan waterfront laid out ahead. Eighteen miles of open water in the middle of one of the busiest shipping and ferry areas in the Mediterranean, which makes it a good day to have somebody actually keeping a lookout rather than everybody looking at the volcano.

The Ferries Are the Weather

This is the part that makes the Bay of Naples different from anywhere else on this site.

Fast ferries and hydrofoils run between Naples, Sorrento, Capri, Ischia and Procida at intervals of minutes through the season. They run on fixed fairways, they are quick, and their wash is substantial. Three consequences worth planning around:

• Fairways are effectively no-anchor zones. Keep clear of harbour entrances and the lanes between them, and never anchor where a hydrofoil would have to alter for you.
• Wash, not wind, is what moves you. In a Mediterranean bay in July the wind may do nothing all night while your boat surges several metres every few minutes on somebody's wake.
• Wash is also what trips your alarm. And this is where crews make the mistake: they widen the radius until the false alarms stop. That is the wrong fix — a radius wide enough to ignore wash is a radius wide enough to ignore a drag.

The right fix is the same one that works everywhere else, applied more carefully here: set the centre on the anchor rather than the boat, and set the radius from the rode you actually have out plus a margin for surge. A boat centred correctly and swinging on 40 m of chain in 6 m of water does not need a 120 m circle to survive a ferry — it needs 80, which is also tight enough to notice when the anchor lets go. An alarm centred on the boat instead of the anchor is what produces the false triggers people blame on the ferries. The method is in our guide to anchoring a boat, and the scope calculator turns your depth and chain into the number.

Getting a Space

Since space is the binding constraint, here is what actually works in this bay in season.

1. Arrive by two, not by five. The good spots in Chiaiolella and Sant'Angelo are gone by mid-afternoon in July and August. This single habit changes the cruise more than any other.
2. Have the fallback chosen before you need it. Sorrento for Capri, Procida's north side for Chiaiolella, Ischia's west coast for Sant'Angelo. Deciding at dusk is deciding badly.
3. Anchor for the room you have, not the scope you want. In a crowded bay you will end up on shorter scope than you would like. That is a reason to set the anchor harder and watch it more closely, not a reason to pretend the scope is fine — and it is exactly why how far apart boats should anchor is worth reading before you go.
4. Watch who anchors after you. The boat that arrives at seven and drops across your chain is the boat you will be discussing at seven tomorrow morning — the recovery is in our Med mooring guide.

The Bottom Line

Sixty-two miles, four days, three islands and a submerged Roman town — and almost none of the difficulty is in the sailing. The Bay of Naples is the gentlest cruising ground in this Italian series and the one that most rewards being organised: leave early, choose the fallback in advance, treat Capri as lunch, and accept that your neighbours, not the forecast, are the thing you are planning around.

And when you have found your space and set the hook in six metres of Procida sand, set the circle tight and centred on the anchor. In a bay where something wakes the boat every few minutes, the only alarm worth having is one that can still tell the difference between a ferry and a drag. All five stops are in our Gulf of Naples anchorage guide.