And this is what I call a SAFE harbor!
Apart from being our Mediterranean center, Brindisi is a commercial port and a small naval base. In all the time times we’ve been here we’ve only seen one of these ships move. But I’m guessing that with the migrant crisis ongoing, they may be called into action soon.
If you remember, back in Sicily we shared our visit with a meeting between the Italian foreign minister and his counterpart from Libya trying to come to some kind of agreeable solution. Well it appears that didn’t achieve much. The Italians are threatening to send naval ships to just outside Libyan waters to turn back the boats from smugglers and aid agencies that are trying to bring migrants to Italy. The Libyans are not happy with this, but you can see the Italians’ point. I’m also not sure how legal such an action would be, but I’m guessing that the Italians believe that no-one is going to stop them from doing it. The EU hasn’t been a model of proactivity and support up to now.
We’ve been here almost two weeks. No matter what happens. each year we have a similar period of downtime due to the need to fix stuff. This year it has been exacerbated by the lightning strike, but the effect has been the same.
We like the people in the shipyard here; they are the most organized, capable and professional team we’ve had to deal with. They really seem to know their stuff and have a pretty good idea how to solve most problems. It’s when we go outside the yard to specialists that the problems start.
Over the winter, we had a specialist "fix" a problem with our water maker; he did work; we paid him but, lo and behold, it wasn't fixed. Much diagnosis by the yard people and we’re hoping that the problem they have found is the real deal. The lightning didn’t do nice things to our instrument network unfortunately. Local diagnosis has highlighted the problem really slowly but the critical issue is getting the special replacement cables which are almost unavailable in Italy. (BTW this frustrates the Italians too.) We’ve had to have cables made as a temporary fix to enable us to sail until the proper ones arrive. We thought that the annoying noise would go away once we solved the instrument network issue. But it didn’t and heads are being scratched as I write this.
So what have we done with ourselves? Being “stuck in Brindisi” isn’t all that bad as our daughter pointed out. And she’s right. We’ve used the time to clean the boat; discover some new restaurants; become more familiar with the technical details of our boat; wonder why Beneteau did some of the strange things they did; wonder why Beneteau can’t actually document the boat “as built” and finally get some much needed exercise.
On Sunday, we decided to escape to Lecce. This is a beautiful medieval town with Roman origins and some elegant buildings.
It has a really enjoyable network of little streets and alleyways, with a wide variety of art and craft shops featuring all kinds of work including textiles. clothes, jewelry, painting and pottery.
Is a frilly purple bicycle an art or a craft?
And, of course, like most of the major towns we have visited on our trip it has some superb Baroque churches.
The one thing we did not escape was the heat. Europe has been having a heatwave and Italy has been in the center of it. The temperature in Lecce reached 109 while we were there (and it's not a "dry heat").. So our day of wandering was cut short by prudence. But we were adventurous and took the train from Brindisi to Lecce on the great Italian rail network which seems to be well-used and much appreciated by its travelers.
Most of the time I’ve had to be on or near the boat so that I can push buttons or find the appropriate manual page as needed. (It’s vital and stressful work). But Lori has managed to make many new acquaintances in the local stores and she seems to attract the kind of generosity that compels people to offer us samples of things we might not otherwise try.. This has been particularly true of local vegetables, wine, cheese and pasta.
Now this is what I call a "mushroom"!
As Meredith says, how bad can being stuck like this really be?
We hope to be out of here by Tuesday, at the latest. But the delay creates a potential visa issue. The Schengen system allows us to stay for only 90 days out of any 180 in the zone (which is more or less equivalent to the EU but ,confusingly, not quite.) We have a document in Italian which says we couldn’t move because we had no functioning navigation equipment and everyone has told us this will be fine but, equally, no-one is particularly interested in it. We’ll see!