It is time to head for Riposto - our last stop on Sicily. If we want to get there at all in the next few days we have to leave now. The Italian marine forecast is describing the overall weather pattern where we are as “unstable”. What this means is that there is a large storm to the north of Sicily in the Tyrrhenian Sea; a large storm to the south of Sicily over Malta and a large storm to the east of Sicily in the Ionian Sea. if you recall the map of Sicily, this means that the island is pretty much surrounded by storms. We have one day in which to get to Riposto before the weather deteriorates.
We set off in calm weather. The trip is largely uneventful apart from our encounter with a whale. Lori was in the cockpit and I was down below doing some vital captain things. I hear a gasp and Lori shouts "I saw a whale!” So I ask where thinking that she would say “Over there.” But no, she says “Right next to the boat”. She saw it’s back and fluke as it dived below the boat only a few feet from where she was sitting. I was just glad that she didn’t see it a few seconds earlier. If she’d had a close encounter of the face-to-face kind with a whale, you would have heard the scream all the way back to Arizona, As it is, she is calling to the whale asking it to come back and “play”. I am calmly suggesting that this is not a dolphin and that when whales “play” around boats like ours it can often be to thedetriment of the boat. Fortunately the whale does not come back.
A rare view of Etna without clouds or much haze
Riposto is the most expensive marina we have visited in Italy and not for any good reason that we can see other than its proximity to Mt. Etna and its convenience as a stopping off point before the Straits of Messina to the north. The facilities are modest and the service inattentive, but we are glad to be here safely before the storm. Riposto itself does not seem to have benefited much from its location so close to major tourist attraction. It has a faded shabbiness that is, however, brightened by some interesting restaurants. We eat in an excellent little enoteca called “Glass” and have some wonderful sea bass carpaccio and wine.
The night is quiet but the next morning Etna is lost in ominous clouds and the wind is starting to blow. Shortly after torrential rain starts drumming on the boat and then the thunder and lightning starts. For boats lightning is not good. They have a large metal thing called the mast sticking 60 ft. into the air and seeming to say “Strike me!” We are not struck, but at one point there is a huge boom and the marina loses power - a close one. After the storm passes, they struggle for the rest of the day to restore reliable power to the harbor.
If we thought that we had escaped unscathed, we are wrong. A few hours later doing an engine check, there is a beeping from an alarm. None of the usual indicators are lit and everything seems to be fine apart from the alarm. It is Sunday so we wait until Monday to seek out assistance.
The marina directs us to their boat yard. I go there are the owner says “Before you tell me what’s wrong, I have to tell you that we can’t do anything on your boat until Friday. We’re just too busy”. I look quizzically at him but he means it.
Alternative sources of aid are hard to find. I reach out to people we know in the area and to our boat yard back in Brindisi for support. But Google provides the best answer. There is another engine specialist in Riposto. I call but they don’t really speak English (but they speak it a little better than we speak Italian). The answer is to text them and they then use Google translate to work out what we are needing. They say they will come right away. At the same time Lori finds an engine repair van on the quay a little way from our boat. She asks them to come and look at our engine. It is the same company! And soon we have a father and two sons looking at and listening to our engine. They have no answer but they say that our engine is running fine. It nay just be a faulty alarm. They work for about an hour and when they leave, I ask, “How much?”. The father signs”Don’t worry about it” and they leave. There are some very nice people in this world.
One of the technicians had asked if we were sure that it was not some other alarm that was sounding but I couldn’t think of one in the heat of the moment. However, Lori and I thought about it a bit and realized that the problem was not with the engine but with our complex close quarters maneuvering system which has a light flashing. This is good news and bad news - we have a pretty good idea what the problem is but we can’t switch off the alarm or disable the system. Any motoring from now on will have a high pitched continual beep as a backdrop. “What’s the most annoying noise in the world?”
Diagnosing this reveals other problems. Our autopilot is not working, our depth and wind gauges are not working, our water tank level is showing zero when we know it’s not empty and our AIS system seems to be out also. Only the last of these is easy to fix by rebooting the device.
At least we know what the date and time is .....
All this is too complex to get fixed in Riposto and we’re not minded to wait four days for the grumpy guy in the boat yard to tell us he can’t fix it until September 2018. So we decide to try to get True Colors back to Brindisi. We will be partially blind, deafened by the alarm and steering manually all the 260 miles back to Brindisi. But GPS is working so we should be able to know where we are and what direction we are heading with some accuracy. (At this point all the older “real” sailors are saying “Sonny, that’s what it was like in the old days. Stop whining and get on with it. In my day, I had to sail single-handed to school every day and it was a headwind each way …..”)
But the highlight of our stay in Riposto was getting to meet the “Captain of the Seven Seas” (whose other name is Luigi). He is five and a half and with his mom, Morella, chatted to Lori on our first day in the marina. And when I say “chatted” I mean “chatted”. He is quite fluent in English (as well as his native Italian) and interested in everything to do with boats. They had just finished reading the Odyssey together. He really wanted to come on the boat that day but his mom had his baby sister in her arms and she was not comfortable letting him come on board by himself. We suggested they come back another day. They did, on the day of the storm, but we were below and didn’t hear them.
Fortunately, they tried one more time on our last day in Riposto and they came on board. He was interested in seeing everything and had a pretty good understanding of what things were for. In a few years he will be an excellent crew member before he graduates to a boat of his own.
And the other thing that struck me is how does the brain separate the concept of two different languages to such an extent that we don’t use an English word when we’re talking Italian and vice-versa. Luigi is five (and a half) and seems to faultlessly know when he is speaking which language. Interesting.
He came back a couple of hours later to wave goodbye. We hope that we can meet again next year.