Fundamentally, it is not easy to get from the east coast of Italy (in our case Brindisi) to Sicily which lies off to the west of the mainland. The south-eastern coast of Italy and the whole of the sole of the “boot” don’t have much going on. The towns and harbors are functional in nature rather than picturesque and the distances between good harbors/marinas can be quite large. In good weather, it’s bit of a slog and in bad weather it can be quite challenging.
Guess what we had ……
The first leg goes south from Brindisi to Santa Maria di Leuca which is at the very end of the heel of Italy. It’s an odd little town with old, elegant merchant homes now trying to fit in with the tourists who come here for its beaches. Not that there are a lot of tourists but, even so, I think that the character of the town must have changed a lot in the last fifty or so years.
This first leg is long, almost sixty miles. This makes for a ten-hour day for a sailing yacht and our ten hours are characterized by high temperatures and a gentle wind blowing from behind the boat. I know that sounds like it might be helpful, but it’s not. The wind wasn’t strong enough to drive us forward at the speed we need and the absence of a tangible breeze (the wind is cancelled out by the forward motion of the boat) makes it feel very hot indeed.
In the middle of the trip, the Italian Coast Guard swing by to check us out and ask us where we are going and how many people are on board. It’s all very friendly but we all know why they’re doing it.
After Santa Maria, we head north into the instep of Italy and Gallipoli. This is not really necessary from a route perspective, but the town is lovely and is probably the best location for sailing yachts on the whole south coast.
We spend a few days in Gallipoli which was founded as part of the larger Greek empire and whose name is an Italianization of the Greek for beautiful city. And it is indeed beautiful with narrow lanes, little piazzas, great seafood restaurants and many churches - many churches.
But where did I leave my horse?
But of course it has been replaced by
I don't think there's a market opening for Safeway here
Like most towns in Souther Italy, summer is the time for festivals in Gallipoli. As someone told us back in Trani, "It's summer, it's hot, it's time to party." In Puglia in particular the parties involve, saints, fireworks, processions and street lights that all have the same decorative design. It feels old, charming and immutable. Not giving way to trends and modernity retains the distinctive character of a place.
The Gulf of Taranto is an unavoidable long leg on this route. It’s another sixty or seventy miles from one side to the other with no stopping options in between. We had done well last year and found a little bay with three or four mooring buoys in a perfect location for spending the night after the crossing. This was our plan again.
We get there late in the day - no buoys! Nothing in the plot books, websites, wikis or blogs said they had been removed. So, tired but undaunted, on to Plan B. Our original buoys are/were part of a national park which has more buoys and anchorages just a couple of miles away. So we motor there.
No buoys; no boats at anchor. This is not helpful to say the least. On to Plan C - yes, we did have a Plan C. There’s a little harbor with a little marina in roughly the same location but we find the entrance to be shallow with some dangerous rocks scattered about. There are questions in our mind about the depth of the marina in general and we try to reach them on VHF. No response.
The key question is “Do we risk it or move on to somewhere else?” Without any local knowledge or logistical support it seems foolish to risk it. So we decide to move on.
We’re looking at an unplanned overnight sail. Not ideal, but I like it better than the alternative. We head for Roccella Ionica which would have been our next stop anyway. The night is warm and pleasant and passes without any major or even minor incidents and we arrive at Roccella Ionica just as it’s getting light.
We cruise around a little just to be polite before trying to raise the marina on the VHF. No reply. But we’ve been here before, so we know what we’re in for. There is almost no wind and we motor calmly into the marina, find a suitable slot and moor ourselves up well without any assistance whatsoever. We seem to be getting better at this stuff!
Time for bed.
The town here is over 2 kilometers away and doesn’t offer many attractions beyond basic provisioning. However the marina has a major plus point (for one of us anyway) - pizza by the meter. Yup! They sell rectangular pizza one meter long or fifty centimeters long (if you’re on a diet).
Lori can never resist.
The restaurant is quite special too. It is located on the quay of the marina and seems to be able to cater for about 500 people at a sitting. It’s usually full and people get turned away. In a town the size of Roccella it seems that a sizable proportion of the population must eat here at least once a week. And with those kind of numbers, it is possible that they can sell a kilometer of pizza a night (or at least a weekend). Pizza-meters per year is an official dietary measure here.!
We spend two nights here to recuperate from the overnight sail. I convince Lori NOT to have pizza the second night. But, to be honest, their seafood is not as good as their pizza.
The final leg is another long one - seventy miles to our landfall in Sicily, Taormina. The weather has started to be uncooperative again and the long-term forecast does not look good. We either go now or wait as many as five days before we see better weather again.
The problem here is that bad weather gets created by the Straits of Messina (the narrowest point between Italy and Sicily) and is often compounded by westerly gales swinging round the north and south sides of Sicily. It looks like we might have it all if we don’t get to Sicily soon.
The first part is fairly easy; motor sailing into uncooperative winds. But as we’ve found in the past, when you leave the shelter of the mainland of Italy and strike out for Sicily (which is still more that 25 miles away) the situation can change in an instant.
For us the wind switched round to the north (out of the Straits), increased in strength to Force 7 (about 30 knots) and sent a surprisingly large swell across our beam. Interesting. Interesting enough to take True Colors off autopilot and sail her ourselves. It was wet enough to force me to wear my sailing gloves at the helm to get better traction on the wheel. Almost unheard of ...
Three hours of concentration, big waves and large holes in the sea opening up around True Colors from time to time get us to the other side wet, tired but pretty much unperturbed. Lori takes over the helm for the downwind last leg to Taormina and gets her first lesson with big seas - know where they are coming from. One wet butt later we have lesson material to review.
A salt-encrusted Lori gets a salt-encrusted True Colors (who seemed to enjoy herself by the way) onto one of the very solid buoys in Taormina. This is just as well. Overnight the wind starts gusting to 60 knots and all the boats here are being blown about in all sorts of directions. But we’re all firmly attached and apart from being uncomfortable we are perfectly safe and have a wonderful view of Mt. Etna.
The winds persist and we don’t leave the boat for two days. So our “landfall” didn’t actually involve being on land at all. So I guess it doesn’t really count. That honor will be passed to our next port after our passage through the Straits of Messina.