“In thunder, lightning or in rain?” Based on our experience from this trip, the correct answer is “All of the above”. Especially if you throw in a heavy dose of “gales” as well.
It all started innocently enough. (But the best ones always do. Can't you hear the cellos?)
Sardinia's 150 miles in this direction
It’s a long way from Sicily to Sardinia, over 150 miles across the Sardinia Strait. This can be a tricky piece of water as it acts as a funnel for the weather from the Mediterranean proper to the south and west into the Tyrrhenian Sea to the north and east. The trip represents the longest leg we’ve done by ourselves - about 25 hours and most of that time out of sight of land. When land starts to appear towards the end of the crossing you get a little inkling of how Columbus and the early explorers must have felt (but we had the added comfort of knowing that there was going to be land there).
Anyway, the weather was calm and the sky was clear. We saw the best Milky Way we have seen in all our travels. You don’t really understand the impact of light pollution until you get somewhere where there is almost none. When you see it, your first thought is that it’s a hazy light grey cloud; hen you realize that the cloud is made up of countless points of light; then you doubt yourself and go back to the cloud theory; but all the stars refute that interpretation and you’re left with the only obvious conclusion - “Space is big - very, very, very big”.
The night ends with a sliver of the new moon rising behind us and Orion crisp and clear just above the eastern horizon.
Sardinia is very pretty; in many ways prettier than Sicily. Sicily is more arid and a harsher landscape whereas Sardinia seems to have more rainfall and water so the hills are greener and the valleys lusher. Put together they remind me of Scotland (or at least what Scotland might look like if it had a warm Mediterranean climate. Maybe in a few global warming decades?)
Our arrival point is Cape Carbonara. Where the pasta dish comes from? Nope. Firstly, “carbonara” refers to workers making charcoal and secondly the dish has hazy origins in Rome (where oddly not much charcoal is made). We stay a couple of nights in a nice marina to recuperate from our overnight before setting out up the coast.
We have decided to sample some parts of the east and southern side of the island. The east side of the island, in particular, is supposed to be the more sheltered side. (Remember this for later.) We’re going to have to make two out and back trips one to the north and then one to the south. Not ideal (as you tend to see everything twice) but we can’t fight the geography.
We make a nice trip to a little marina farther north with a little bit of sailing followed by some motoring. We are enjoying the green of this landscape. The marina has a pizza restaurant - Lori has pizza.
The next day we are going to head as far north as we will do on this trip to a little marina north of Arbatax (the second city of Sardinia). Thunderstorms are forecast, but these are supposed to be primarily on the land over the mountains. As we proceed north the thunder clouds start to form and fill over the mountains to our west. Then they start to move in our direction Whole sections of the landscape are blotted out by the heavy downpours in the distance. They are coming closer.
As we pass Arbatax it starts to get swallowed up in the rain and there are a few lightning strikes on the land nearby. But we make it into our marina and the storm never quite comes as far north as we are - a new meaning for “missed by a mile”.
A nice start to the day
But the next day we have to head back south hoping to spend the night at anchor. It starts OK but the clouds start to build again in the afternoon.
Lori was napping below and I woke her up when we got to the anchorage. The spot was fine but the sky to the north was blackening aggressively. Prudence won our and we decided to press on to the marina at Porto Corallo “just in case”.
Five minutes later it was twenty-three knots, fortunately behind us. Ten minutes after that the gusts peaked at forty-two knots. All these “knots” can be confusing and hard to relate to anything on land, so a guy called Francis Beaufort in 1805 to give a better understanding of what the wind effect to expect. Any speed above 34 knots is a gale (of one kind or another) and here whole trees move and shake and twigs certainly break off. From 28 - 34 knots you have a “Near Gale” where it’s difficult to walk against the wind and, as they quaintly put it, umbrellas are impossible to use.
The direction of the wind is another factor. Thirty knots behind the boat has you surfing down waves and moving quickly with a high degree of stability. Thirty knots an the nose and you are barely moving, and can be crashing into waves and slamming down into their troughs.
So we’re headed downwind for Porto Corallo and I know I have to turn right and go beam-on to get in to the harbor entrance. Shouldn’t be too hard except there’s another boat coming upwind into the entrance almost at the same time as us. To h*** with being polite, we’re going in!
We turn into the narrow harbor entrance and there is a dinghy broken down in the middle. The two fishermen in the little boat have eyes as large as dinner plates clearly thinking that they were about to be rammed by a 48-foot boat with a recreational boater at the helm. Avoiding action in a tight space is needed with twenty-five knots blowing.
We don’t hit anyone and, in particular, no fishermen or their boat.
Our prize for all this is that I get to park True Colors in a twenty-six knot cross wind.
Again, we don’t hit anything. And we are safe and sound looking at the lightning strikes for the next couple of hours.
No, it's not night time!
Sardinia has its moments! I didn’t want pizza again tonight but, after all this, it seems just fine to me.
Capo di Pula with the (cloud) shape of things to come
The next day we pass Cape Carbonara again and head south for an anchorage in a beautiful bay just north of a ruined Phoenician city that has almost entirely slid into the water. If you take a dinghy across the water, you can see the streets and the ruins just below the surface. A place worthy of detailed exploring next time.
This part of the trip we are deciding to do more anchoring and get Lori more comfortable with the concept. We have not had good experiences anchoring in Croatia due to weed on the bottom and this has colored her view.
Pretty but what's it with those clouds?
This time we have good anchor placement in sand and we pass a quiet night with little wind or weather to bother us. A beautiful sail the next day as we head to almost the very south of the island. Any this point we are closer to Africa than we are to any other part of Europe. We are tacking for the last part and “racing” with a French boat who are enjoying themselves as much as we are. Another night at anchor, again in sand. A bit windy at the start but we are solidly set.
We meet Pedro who approaches in a dinghy and says “I come in peace” making the peace sign with his fingers. Have we warped back into the sixties? Maybe this part of Sardinia never left them? But no, he offers to deliver bread and fruit and anything else we like in the morning before our departure. We place our order.
The next morning he comes at the appointed time with all our provisions except the bread. They forgot to put it into the car. His mom is going back for it and he will deliver it later. But we have to leave. We are heading out of the bay and we get a text from Pedro saying that the has the bread but couldn’t get it to us. He says “Next time you will have free bread.” We’ll take him up on that.
North back to Carbonara again where we plan to anchor for the night. The forecast is for light winds 4 - 5 knots; perfect for anchoring.
I don’t know if Sardinian weather forecaster recycle old forecasts but, if so, this time they chose one from the wrong file. Instead of 5 knots, we have upwards of 25 knots (a slight difference) and a nasty swell which is for long periods at right angles to the direction of the wind. Far from ideal and in other circumstances I would have moved. But with the forecast so wrong I have no reliable data from which to identify a better option. It’s bumpy, very bumpy until about 11:30. I stay on anchor watch and let Lori get some sleep (which remarkably she can do even when the boat is bouncing around like crazy), Of the forty or so boats that were in the bay before the storm only a handful stayed all the way through the night. Where they went and if it was any better there, I don’t know.
Time to retrace our steps back to Sicily.
Maritime weather warnings can tend to be broad in their geographical scope and vague about exactly what to expect. The last few days forecasts have had these characteristics - risks of isolated thunderstorms across a wide area stretching from Sardinia all the way across to the Italian mainland 200 miles away. We’ve seen stuff like this before in Croatia.
We have a number of weather forecasting apps all of which are pretty mellow about the conditions for the next few days. Also, there’s no sign that there is more settled weather on the way for quite some time, so we decide to head off.
Innocent-looking little clouds and a pretty clear sky
I took the first watch so Lori went to bed about 9:00. As my watch proceeded, the thunderclouds grew behind us and the lightning started. One of the things about being at sea is that you can see a lot farther than you can on land (no obstructions) and you have a 360 view. So when I say thunderstorms started to form all round us, I mean ALL ROUND us. The most troubling one was behind and it seemed to be moving towards us.
I start to see different characteristics of thunderstorms. (I know, but what else are you going to do at night in the middle of an ocean surrounded by them?) I call this type of thunderstorm a menagerie thunderstorm. That’s because the clouds take on all sorts of animal shapes as they build; we’ve seen roosters, bunnies (categorized as “big”, “bad” or “big, bad” by Lori), and even Spongebob (quite common) among others. Out of these huge clouds come the heaviest downpours you can imagine. They are so dense that when lightning flashes behind them, it is completely obscured by the rain.
We were however doing well. The thunderstorms were moving diagonally past us and we were moving faster than they were. So after a couple of hours of this we had had a spectacular and ominous light show with some strong winds as the rain passed but nothing else.
We enter phase 2. Another thing about thunderstorms here is that the sky is often completely clear around them. So we could see the stars and the moon was out. And we could see exactly where the thunderstorms were. The new type I christen “sassy” (semi-autonomous and self-sustaining). What this means is that individual little clouds make individual little thunderstorms, mostly lightning in the clouds but frequently strikes come down to the surface. When there are fifty or sixty of these clouds in our 360 degree view, this has a way of grabbing your attention. In fact it not only grabs your attention but it holds on tight and shakes it violently.
And let’s get back to that forecast of “isolated” thunderstorms. These are “isolated” in the same way that you’re “isolated”in a shopping mall on Christmas Eve.
Lori awoke to this and I was expecting wide eyes and fatalism but no. She took it all in her stride (or in as much of her stride as she could). We start planning and navigating our way through the storms. They didn’t seem to be moving fast and their small size meant that the lightning strikes were in fairly predictable locations. We do this for about three hours.
A couple of interesting variants. These sassy storms can get together in little clusters. When they do this, the individual clouds get a crackling orange border as the charge passes between them and then a super-strike comes down to the ocean. And even the lightning in the clouds can be startling. A couple of times I had a flash directly above me; you cannot imagine how bright it is; way more so than daylight: there was no sound but the intensity of the flash made me physically duck in the cockpit.
But this phase passed and we were looking forward to a more mellow voyage for the rest of the night. But just as we ducked under the last set of sassy storms, the wind picked up and we had twenty-five plus knots for the next two hours - wind, waves, darkness and lightning. We didn’t need this.
But dawn eventually comes and we can see the island of Marettimo which lies twenty miles off of our destination, Marsala. This time “yes”, this is indeed where the wine comes from (but more on that in the next blog).
Still perky after all these hours ...
But Mother Nature decided she deserved an encore for her performance during the night and right over Marsala was a big, bad bunny storm. We watched the rain and the lightning for about the next hour (from a safe distance) before sneaking into Marsala harbor behind the storm.
I don’t park well with only five hours of sleep in the last forty-eight. But no mishaps and everything was fine.
We buttoned up the boat and we slept!