Southern Sicily - all you need is a good map, a head for heights and chocolate

The southern coast of Sicily is much less frequently visited by sailing yachts.  There are no picturesque little islands to visit and there are only a few places where there is a sheltered anchorage. As a result most of our overnight stops in this segment of our trip are at little marinas.

This is not to say that there is nothing to see on this coast - in fact far from it.

Our first stop is Marsala where the sweet fortified wine comes from. Here we are resting up after our tumultuous thunderstorm crossing and hoping for better weather to come.  We take the time to go into the town this year. We somehow didn’t quite manage to do that last time.

The old town hidden behind the scruffiness of the “newer” buildings of the port, is a surprise.  Baroque-style building and churches with some nice pedestrian streets and some interesting shopping. We are enjoying this until we look at the sky. thunderstorms had been forecast (as usual) but this time they meant it.  Early in the skies opened and the rain poured down. Streets were almost instantly flooded and we sheltered in a little arcade.  One of the problems of being on a boat is that you usually can only get about on foot.  So heavy rain is a problem; as are the flooded streets with cars making splashing waves as they drive through them with the usual Italian panache.

As the storm starts to pass, we dodge between sheltered spots trying not to get too soaked and too bedraggled in the process. Then we see an oasis (if you can have one in the middle of a downpour) - the Bianchi Marsala and Grappa distillery which has a reception and sales area.

We reluctantly ;) force ourselves to go in. We are soggy and a little disreputable; they don’t care.

We meet Claudio the grandson of the founder of the company who is working at the sales point. We taste Limoncello and Arancello (orange). Both are good but the Limoncello wins. Interestingly enough, Bianchi makes the Limoncello that’s sold through Trader Joe’s in the US. They are quite proud of this as you can see. 

Lori vows to take this picture to her local Trader Joes to validate the authenticity of the product, get free stuff, become the official Trader Joes ambassador to Italy or some such.  It’s not a bad plan.

However, additionally, they have grappa. We have been pleasantly surprised, as have some of our readers (you know who you are Perry) by the quality of the Puglia grappa.  But this is better - the Founder’s reserve in particular.  Lori tries to devise schemes for getting this in (or to) the US. We should all get behind her on this one. Until she works that out, in situ consumption is the only option. A hardship - but we’ll put up with it.

Lori is feeling the pressure of getting to Ragusa in time to meet our friends from last year Morella and Luigi (Captain of the Seven Seas). So we skip quickly through the next two marinas and, despite the non-cooperation of the weather,  get to Ragusa in good time.

We have lunch and a long lazy afternoon on the boat with them I take the time to show Luigi more of the details on the boat.  He checks the oil, makes sure our lines are tight and gets to start the engine. This is all a pretty big deal and we celebrate this by giving him his official True Colors crew cap.  He looks cool.

But, as he points out, the next thing he wants to do is sail.  Maybe next time when we have a suitable lifejacket for him.

We are slightly ahead of schedule so decide to take a couple of days to hire a car and visit the interior. It’s a good change of pace and there are interesting places beyond the coastline.

Moon over the marina

Our first stop is Caltagirone renowned for its traditional ceramics. The town is pretty much focused on ceramics with artisanal workshops all over the place. 

The style is pretty specific and the designs are displayed in a unique fashion - on the risers of a set of steps in the town.  The steps are lined with shops selling  all sorts of ceramic goods.

The beautiful lady is a one-off design not native to Caltagirone

I was a little disappointed however.  I had hoped it would be a little like Murano in Venice where the same traditional workshops have evolved with new generations of designers who offer new concepts using the same long-established skills. But not yet in Caltagirone; the links to the past are clear but the future direction is not.

The landscape around here is quite unique. It is a blend of things that are familiar but the mix is quite unusual. The hills are steep and the tops are laid bare down to the grey rock underneath. Stones are used, much like inlaces in the UK, to make walls between large fields which have contented-looking cows and in the distance sheep and goats.

The steep hills imply deep valleys and gorges. We cross the two highest viaducts in Sicily - at up to 522ft high they are, you might say, impressive.  Also a little nerve-wracking due to the tragic events in Genoa. But it is also worrying because recently another viaduct in Sicily collapsed (although the extent of the “collapse” is hotly disputed). However in this case and in true Sicilian style “revenge” has been vowed on the builders and architects. I’d be worried; if anyone understands the concept of revenge, it’s a Sicilian!

We survive multiple crossings of the bridges. A few more than necessary in fact. Lori was navigating with a paper map (I know) and we were not having much luck identifying the roads we needed to be on.  I looked down at the map she was using two-thirds of the way through the day and said “Why aren’t you using the larger-scale map on the other side of the sheet?”

“There’s another map on the other side???????”

Ah well, we’re on vacation. And, in truth, the other map wasn’t that much better.

The viaducts lead to Modica a superb Baroque-style town that is split into two parts Modica Basso (low) and Modica Alto (high) which are joined by a set of (you guessed it) steps which  climb the guidebook smugly says “is not attempted by many people”.

There’s no way we’re leaving that challenge on the table and we make our way up steps and along winding streets to the top of the hill and the inevitable cathedral dominating the surrounding valleys. It is worth the effort.

The other reward for all this strenuous climbing and daredevil bridge crossing is chocolate. Modica is famed for a chocolate that we've tasted before in the Aeolian islands but this is where it really comes from.

Some people say it's made by a cold process which does not require the cocoa to melt and gives the chocolate an oddly grainy texture. This is apparently not true - it is the absence of butter that gives it the unusual consistency.  It is quite tasty but I doubt that any of it will survive all the way back to Arizona.

Back in the marina, there is a little store which is selling specialty foods, vegetables and wines from Sicily. They focus on organic artisanal produce.  This evening they have a local farmer come with his vegetables. A large bag of onions, lettuce, courgettes and other stuff comes in at less than $2. Even with Amazon behind them, Whole Foods will be hard pressed to match this!

We also meet a nice French couple, Lionel and Isabelle, who are over from Malta where they have an apartment. We chat and decide to sail together the next day to Porto Palo which is right on the southeast corner of Sicily. The plan is to anchor in a fairly sheltered bay and make our way the day after to Siracusa.

The sail is supposed to be mellow and it is … for almost all the way. At then end and just before we are thinking about parking, the wind increases to 20 - 25 knots. Not ideal for anchoring. But we get there first and find a good spot and the anchor sets quickly and we are secure.  I’m not sure if Lionel and Isabelle would have anchored if we had not done so, but they do a pretty good job and are just a few boat lengths from us.

The four of us have dinner on board True Colors and by the time the meal is over the wind has died completely and the water is still and the sky is clear. Everyone sleeps well.

The next day we motor over calm seas to Siracusa. This is one of our favorite places in this part of the world. The city dates back to Greek and Roman times and was the birthplace of Archimedes (of “Eureka” fame),

A cathedral with three architectural styles - - Greek, Roman and Norman.

The old town on the island of Ortigia is quite charming and, although a tourist destination, is not overrun in the way that so many others are. The mix of visitors and locals seems to be about right.

In the marina we meet Stephano on his rebuilt one-of-a-kind Sparkman and Stephens boat. He has been sailing for quite some time in the Italian Navy and in civilian life. He is a past president of the Italian Lega Navale (which promotes things relating to sailing and the sea and provides sailing opportunities for young people). He is a mine of local knowledge and a trove of stories about the sea and sailors.

Onion and orange salad

Mussels, of course

This is our last stop on Sicily sadly and we seek out good restaurants to savor the exceptional food of the island.

Lori's reaction to Sicilian food

It’s hard to leave the island and the town.

Lori, Colin and Sardinia - "When shall we three meet again? ...."

“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!

Palermo and the west

Towns and cities in the south of Italy can be pretty scruffy.  Years of deferred maintenance have started to take a serious toll on the buildings and infrastructure.  The poster child for this is Palermo.  It is a city with thousands of years of history at the confluence between the cultures of the East, the West and Africa.At various times it was ruled by the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the  Arabs, the Normans, the Swabians, the Aragonese,  and the Bourbons. (I bet the school kids don’t like their history classes very much - who could remember all that?) But all these influences are evident in some of the superb churches and palaces of the city. The sheer variety is astonishing.

And it is this that makes Palermo one of our favorite places in the south - along with the bustling vibrance of the town, its narrow alleyways and open-air street markets and restaurants whose dishes clearly show the vast range of culinary influences that their invaders/rulers brought with them.

Couscous is common here; we eat at a restaurant called Garaffa which is a word derived from the Arabic “carafe”; the most popular street food here is arancini (a rice ball that can be stuffed with various different fillings) which were apparently conceived in the 10th century when Sicily was under Arab rule.

Arancini are, I think, the perfect representation of what I like about Palermo.  They are slightly scruffy and nondescript on the surface but then when you dig  down  under the surface you find all sorts of delights.

We’re here at the weekend and the weather is steamily hot with thunderstorms in the afternoons. We are having lunch near Palermo cathedral when one downpour occurs.  We anticipated this and chose a table inside but the outside diners were soon pouring into the restaurant slightly damp and looking for dry places to eat. Everyone gets closer together and groups start talking to each other (even more so than normal). We strike up a conversation with a young Swedish couple with their  nine month-old baby.  It’s their first vacation with her and it’s been a shock. Apparently they used to spend time at the beach, go to bars etc. - now they don’t and they don’t look entirely comfortable with the change. Hopefully everyone will grow into their new roles .

Just your average Palermo parish church ...

Sunday is not a day to go visiting churches - they tend to be busy doing their real work.  But we managed to sneak into one of the most astonishing - Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio. This church dates back to at least 1143 and is a superb blend of styles with lavish decoration inside. But today it is, as I said, doing its real work and there is a christening going on.  Other tourists are shoo-ed out of the little cathedral but, for some reason, the lady who is clearing the church of tourists tells us we should sit down closer to the altar. The church is closed to the public and we are privileged to watch a very personal service.

There are about five or so babies being baptized today and the service is multi-phased.  Tis being a family occasion and in Italy you cannot call the proceedings “solemn”. They involve laughter, the taking of many photographs and an overall buzz of happy conversation. The babies are doing fine as they are being anointed with oil and the like.  However, the last phase involves at least partial immersion in the water in the font (which was filled from a blue plastic bucket). For this they have to be naked and they get held up like this in front of the congregation.

The babies are not happy.

You can see their thought process - “I didn’t sign up for this part. You told me it was going to be a  big party that was going to be all about me.  I got new clothes and everything. And I'm going to get presents. But you didn’t tell me about this. And there will be photographs!! You’d better not bring them out for my boyfriend or girlfriend in twenty years time. There should be laws against this.  I am not happy”.

Fuzzy but you get a good sense of the occasion

But everyone survives the assault on their dignity and it all ends in happiness (as family occasions here, it seems,  inevitably must).

We head onwards to the north-west of Sicily and round the cape  - Capo San Vito  This is a very striking coastline with mountains dropping straight into the seas.  Like all of Sicily it has a fascinating and varied past The town and the little island of the same name, Isola dei Femme,  was the home of the parents of the baseball player Joe DiMaggio. Not so much “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio?” but more like “Where did you come from?”

Mountains and towns here have names and histories that date back to the time of the Saracen invasions in the 9th and 10th centuries.

Our last stop before heading off to Sardinia is the town of Trapani. We’ve not been here before and it’s a bit of a surprise.  Much larger than we expected and it seems to be thriving as a base for tourism to the neighboring Egadi islands. It is also the home of the Museum of Salt.

I know that most of you will be saying “Why does salt need a museum?” or “Whoever heard of such a thing?” But, actually, there are a number of salt museums dotted around the globe and pay heed to the importance of salt in preserving the food stocks through leaner times. But what vault my attention was that the salt from here is called Nubian salt and the salt pans are in a location just south of Trapani also called Nubia.  But the “real” Nubia is in Egypt on the Nile.  I wonder if they’re connected somehow.

Also around the coast here you can see windmills which were introduced in medieval times.  Strictly speaking they’re not “mills” but are used to pump water from the sea into the lagoons where the sun dries the water out and leaves salt behind.

And, apart from salt, Trapani gives us some lessons in just how the Mediterranean diet (and in this case the Sicilian diet) works.

First of all, the fish.  it’s caught by boats like these……

Note the superyacht in the background. Apparently money can't buy you a good parking space

And guys like these …….

Who deliver it to a fish market like this less than 50 yards from the quay.

Where another guy cuts the swordfish steaks and sells them to us who walk them back to our boat again less than 50 yards away. And we have dinner.

Apart from the swordfish, note the couscous, Sicilian orange sauce and Sicilian lemon

Fresh, additive free and, of course, delicious.

Then there’s the wine.

If you buy it in a restaurant - 20 Euros.

Enjoyable, as you can see

And, if you by it from the vineyard store across the street, it costs 8 euros for the same bottle. But if you buy it direct from the barrel i in the same store it costs 2.75 euros a liter. How to cut out service, marketing and distribution and get really affordable. great wine.

Needless to say, we stock up with fresh provisions and wine for our trip to Sardinia.

North Sicily - where Colin and Lori invent the pandwich

To get to the north of Sicily, we have to pass through the Straits of Messina. This is the narrow channel that separates Sicily from the mainland of Italy. This will be our third passage through this historically difficult patch of water. The difficulties are due to the fact that the straits are at the boundary between two seas - the Tyrrhenian and the Ionian.  These seas have different characteristics and create strong tidal flows that can slow down and even stop a yacht. On top of that there are currents and gusty winds (they had reported 60 knots) just a few days ago.

The straits are mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey.  There they are characterized as two monsters, Scylla and Charybdis - Scylla was a whirlpool and Charybdis a particularly nasty patch of rocks.  These still exist but are not quite as ferocious as in Odysseus’ day.

Odysseus problems are usually attributed to his having annoyed the gods but recently a new explanation has gained credence.  Odysseus lent his iPad charging cord to Agamemnon his king and then never got it back.  He was too polite to say “O king, give me my d**n iPad chord, I need to get home to my wife and family.” So he set off without it and the rest is, as they say, history.

You may not be sure of this but you can believe it to be true as it is the only thing that Fox News and CNN agree on.

Another legendary connection to the Straits of Messina is to the legend of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Morgan le Fay is Arthur’s half-sister, cousin or some such and is a bit of a plotter and schemer. In Italian, her name is Fata Morgana and this name has been given to the optical illusion seen over sea and water where the horizon shimmers and you seem to see things floating in the sky or can see beyond the normal horizon.  This was first documented in the Straits of Messina. But we’ve never seen one here.

Anyway, our trip was entirely uneventful.  With iPad apps (Odysseus take note) you can time your passage as we did to go through at slack water or, better still, with the current helping you. We saw almost no other traffic (very unusual) and even the ferries (which are supposed to be a problem) were well-behaved and not too numerous.

So far; so good. (You know what that portends).

After the straits, we turn left to go along the north coast and get 16 - 20 knots of wind on our nose with seas that are the remnants of the four or five days of gales that have just passed. Not dangerous but bumpy and annoying. Again we’re off autopilot and I am sailing True Colors and getting wet in the process.

We’re heading to Milazzo where we’ve been before. It’s on the sheltered side of a promontory that is not offering much shelter today.  W have tried to book by email and no had any reply from them until we are about 10 miles away. “Sorry, we are full.”

The concocted Plans B and C are not very attractive and may not even be viable.  But Lori manages (by virtue of screaming into the phone over the noise of wind and waves) to contact a little marina close to Milazzo who say that they have space.

We get there and find it to be a little on the full side but they say it’s OK.  Have you seen Italians park cars? Well, they are just as creative at parking boats. A tiny space between two small boats is opened up for us and they indicated that we should squeeze in. Have you seen that video of an octopus squeezing through a tiny hole? We are now kindred spirits (and friends on Facebook).

We make it just in time because the signs are not good.

Red sky at night is not always a delight.

We are in Milazzo for the longest lunar eclipse of the century and the closest approach of Mars to the earth; the blood moon and the red planet add unusual color to the sky.It also happens to be our son, Blake's, birthday. His omens are surely good for the next year.

Milazzo is the jumping off point to the Aeolian Islands.  It’s a short hop and the weather is pretty much calm all the way.  We get to Panarea with its view of the volcano Stromboli.  This is a field of mooring buoys and by the time everyone is in place it feels a lot like a parking lot.

The town has become very fashionable (the Murdochs - Fox News and Sky - and many, many of their guests are arriving for a big party the next day) but the beautiful people have to mingle with the normal folks who turn up hourly in the tripper boats from Sicily and the mainland. An odd mix.

Vulcano our other stop here is an active volcano which we climb for the second time.  This year it’s much more active with more vents and a much stronger sulphur smell on the rim of the crater.

Back to the mainland and a new marina, Capo d’Orlando.  This turns out to be excellent and they are trying to attract business so they are offering three nights for the price of two.  Too good an opportunity to miss.  Road Trip!

True Colors clean and shiny again after five days of salt

We rent a car  for two days and turn our focus away from the sea and the coast. On the first day we visit Tindari.  This settlement dates back to the Phoenicians but its history stretches forward many hundreds of years into the Christian era. 

There are excavations of the old town uncovering Roman and Greek influences.  Although small (for now), there are echoes of Pompeii and Herculaneum here giving you a great feel of what life might have been like back then.

The Christian era is represented by a huge cathedral that is the home of the Black Madonna of Tindari.

Black Madonnas are a lot more common than you might suspect.  There is no particular reason for their color other than their being of a Byzantine origin rather than a European one.  The Lation inscription round the base says "I am black but I am beautiful". I always wondered where Mohammed Ali got that line from.

On day 2 of our trip we head deep into the interior and to the northern slopes of Etna and the vineyards.  This involves driving on some very small twisty roads that go very high up into the mountains.  We are usually stuck behind something like a truck that is going very slowly.

Or, and here is where the "Pandwich" comes in, stuck behind old,  small and underpowered cars struggling to make it up the hills.  One of these is the Fiat Panda. This model was introduced in 1980 (and some of the ones on the road seem to date from that time).  It is said that the numbers  1, 2, 3, 4 (and occasionally 5) on the gear stick refer to the number of hamsters that are pedaling and “R” means that they are resting and you can slide back down the hill at whatever speed you like.

These cars are so numerous that you can often have one in front of you and one behind you - the “classic pandwich”. But today we are lucky, we experience the much rarer  “super pandwich” where the color of the Panda in front of you is the same as the color of the Panda behind you. 

Today our “bread” is light pistachio-colored.  It is amazing that as many as two people in Italy ever liked this color.  Maybe they were all banished to the mountains to atone for their lack of color sense.

Served chilled and slowly warming to room temperature

The winery restaurant is lovely and the wine well worth the trip.  And we can now mangle sufficient Italian to hold stilted conversations with locals who clearly are too polite to do anything other than tolerate and even encourage us.

Hope this roof tile isn't really from the ....

Our final stop before Palermo will be Cefalu with its superb Norman cathedral. But before that, as part of Lori's sailing skill development she is going to take the boat out from her berth in the marina.  She's done this before but this time it's a little more complicated with other boats around and some corners to turn to make it all the way out.

Guess how well it went .... That's my girl!

Now on to Cefalu.

Our plan was to anchor in the little bay near the marina.  This we did but the coastguard were not happy with us (and quite a few other boats) and asked us to move.  So we moved round to a more open bay to the east and anchored in the open on a still night with only one other boat in sight.  Peaceful sleep with gentle rocking and only the fishermen to wake us in the morning.

On to Palermo tomorrow.

Sicily - the hard way

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.

A mixing elbow problem

We’re back in Brindisi with a minor list of problems/issues that need to be looked at.  The yard has been efficient and has technicians lined up to look at the items we raised. A lot of it is minor and rectified in moments - even the water maker problem is, as I suspected, very simple to identify if. as always, a little more difficult to fix.

All this, of course, takes time - time where we and True Colors have relatively little to do. We visit two of our special  places, Lecce and Bari, by train and visit some of our favorite haunts.

Closing in on lunch in Lecce

And in Bari we finally find a good lunchtime restaurant that locals seem to frequent and enjoy.

Also I thought I’d try to catch up on some things that Lori thought I could add to the blog.

Firstly, the VHF radio.  This is one of those things that  isn’t a vital piece of equipment until you need it in an emergency when its “vital-ness” goes off the scale in an instant.  Mostly, it’s just used for calling ahead to marinas to say that we’re arriving or for bored people on watch on ships at 3:00am to make weird noises that they think are funny and insist on sharing with anyone else who happens to be foolish enough to be on Channel 16. Also, apparently, if a noise is funny once, it’e so much more funny the seventh or eighth time that you make it.  And we wonder why ships crash into one another?

But this time on the way over from Lastovo to Vieste, we encounter Rhapsody of the Sea - a large cruise ship,  Remember also that we are not large, and further recall that the Adriatic is in all respects a very large patch of ocean.  We get hailed by Rhapsody of the Sea. 

“True Colors - Captain what is your intention?” At this point one’s mind reels with options from “Entirely, honorable, sir. I simply wish to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage.” to “We intend to ram you, take you all prisoner and hold you for ransom. Break out the Jolly Rodger lads, be afraid, very afraid!”

The professional answer is a little more dull “We intend to pass behind you and you can maintain course.” 

But this is not sufficient, apparently. “Captain, your current course is going across our bow.” Again the answer “We are 50 ft long and can turn on a dime and will do so when we think it is necessary” is neither appropriate nor professional.

“Understood. We will alter course to starboard and parallel your course.” No subsequent communication followed but we are now Facebook friends.

Next, the joys of language translation. In Manfredonia our port of entry to Italy, Lori is as always focused intensely on getting the AC cable connected.  This is a little tense because many marinas permit only one electric connection where we need two to support normal usage and AC.  I am in the marina office working with less important matters like immigration and customs when; the marinero arrives and says “Your house wife needs an adaptor for the shore electrical connection.” Replies like “That is not my house wife, that is (obviously) my boat wife - my house wife is at home.” are not likely to raise much of a laugh or help resolve the issue.

Finally, name on characteristic that Lori and Melania Trump share.  I know, I know, the list is long but in this case it is "a network of aestheticians across the world". In Brindisi, near where we have our boat, there is an aesthetician that Lori visited last year. She decides to go back.  While she is explaining to the receptionist in broken Italian what she wants, there is a yell from the back, "Lori, Lori".  It is the owner who remembers Lori from last year.

Back to that mixing elbow problem ….  All you non-sailors are saying “Finally a problem we can understand and appreciate. If you can’t have your gin and tonics, your martinis, and, heaven forbid, your margaritas on board, then you DO have a problem!  By the way, whose elbow has the problem?”

Sadly, while this would indeed be a calamity, this is not what befell us. The mixer elbow in the engine mixes exhaust gases with sea water before passing it outside the boat.  We had a small hole in ours.  Not good, but definitely could/would get worse.  So we have to fix it.  

Which would you rather pay $400 for?

A: A martini

Or

B: A mixing elbow

The correct answer, of course, is “C: None of the above.”  But this was apparently not an option.

One thing I've noticed about boats, not having grown up with them, is that they really need some kind of exploded diagram like IKEA furniture that says you should have twenty of these, seven of these etc. And that if you put it all back together and have something left over, then you have a problem. The terminology too is obscure and confusing. Whoever heard of "boom vangs", "Cunninghams", "Stern glands" (stop sniggering in the back) and "Joker valves"? But this is al part of the wonderful lore of the sea. 

The part was, thankfully, with us in two days, installed in 30 minutes and we could finally start our sail to Sicily. But first, in what is becoming a tradition (well we've done it twice), a "bon voyage" lunch at Dante's Bistro.  What we thought would be a pork steak turned out to be slightly different and larger.

Delicius but enormous

Back to Brindisi

The morning is hazy as we leave Lastovo.  It almost looks as if there is some fog a little farther offshore.  The sea is a flat calm with no wind at all.  This is a welcome relief from the storms of the past few days; we had expected there to be some waves but all that activity seems to have died down completely.

We reconcile ourselves to motoring the 60 miles to Vieste but in the afternoon the wind picks up and we get to sail at seven or eight knots for about three hours.  

Is she cool or what?

As a non-EU boat, when you go from one country to another in the EU you have to check in at a “port of entry”.  This is where they have customs etc to handle all the formalities that wouldn’t exist if the EU was really one country.  So we park in the marina; I go to the coastguard and say “I would like to check in”; they say “You can’t do that here”.

It turns out Vieste (the ideal entry and exit point for Italy-Croatia sailing) is NOT a port of entry. Oops! I’m usually good at checking this kind of thing.  All I can say is that I was lulled into a false sense of surety by all the blogs and the websites saying that this was the best route to take.

We have to go to Manfredonia  Lori thinks that this is a name somewhat like Genovia (from the Princess Diaries) and she expects a matronly Julie Andrews to appear at any moment. But she doesn’t.

In fact, there are not many people or boats at all in this large and modern marina. We say to the the marinero that we need to check in.  He says that we can do it here, but they’re closed.  In fact, they’ll be closed for the next two days.  This is a problem because we are not supposed to leave the boat if we haven’t checked in.  Two days stuck on a boat in a ghost marina is not appealing.

The marina staff have a good idea.  We get an agent to handle our paperwork (for a fee).  Offices that were closed can now be opened and progress can be made. We never see the customs folk but two of the nicest coastguards visit the boat to check that there is indeed only two of us and that we don’t have any stowaways in our anchor locker. Everything is done crisply and efficiently. We are free to wander the town.

Manfredonia is a bit down-at-heel like many towns in southern Italy that haven’t benefited from the tourist trade.  But it’s bustling at night with people enjoying their evening stroll along the main pedestrian ways in the old town.  The limestone blocks that surface the streets are polished smooth by centuries of people doing just what we are doing now - walking, talking and enjoying the cool of the evening before a leisurely dinner.

Fish tonight (no goat to be found) at a recommended restaurant in a quiet  little courtyard. It offers some interesting menu twists - this is “Fish and chips”.

Squid, octopus, calamari and homemade potato chips

In the morning we head for Trani. I had always wanted to visit because it is supposed to be one of the nicest harbor towns on this coast.  And it is. We get to sail again for the third day in a row - beautiful winds perfectly angled to speed us along at over eight knots.

There are times when sailing has some of the characteristics of golf.  Many less good days can be erased by one good experience. Trani is a good day. The harbor is small. We are the largest boat in the harbor.  While this is good for the ego, it’s otherwise a little tricky.  In order to the largest boat moored in the harbor, you first have to moor IN the harbor.

Our space is narrow (or we are chubby) and there are literally only a few inches on each side. The turning space is also small.  But we manage it in an easy motion without even nudging the boats on either side. The marinero says “Beautiful”. We try to make it look like this happens all the time.

As I said, a lot like golf.

The town and the harbor are lovely with a great sense of the harbor being the heart of the little place. 

Who IS this woman who keeps getting in my photos? I'd complain but she is quite cute.

The fishing boats are in port and the fishermen are selling fresh fish from tables at the back of their boats.  If we knew what to do with any of this stuff, we would have some wonderful dinners.

Instead we opt for a little osteria which serves up some wonderful turbot and tuna (doubtless from the same boats) with a white wine from one of the vineyards near Brindisi.

The next day is another sailing day on to Polignano a Mare - a marina we last stayed in two years ago.  The marinero remembers us - it helps to be a real American boat with a catchy name.  Or it’s our scintillating personalities. The problem with this marina is that it’s little bit out of town but we are just passing through and will eat on board tonight.  The great thing about this marina is the marineros and their level of service.  They are polite, attentive, knowledgable and extremely helpful. This is not a common thing.

The final leg of this trip is back to Brindisi but we  run out of luck with the wind and have to motor sail the whole way. It’s a longish day without much interesting to look at. 

When we park in our boatyard we we normally lie alongside and, in preparation, we fender up accordingly. But when we get to the marine, “our” berth is occupied by another boat and there is no-one to be seen.  We circle a bit and try raising them on the VHF - no reply.  We circle a bit more and some of the yard folks emerge.  They point farther down the opposite pontoon and indicate that we should go stern-to.  This is another tight fit, True Colors is a big girl.  It also involves a heroic change of fender and line configuration by Lori while I am trying to line us up for a sharp right turn in reverse into our mooring. We put this into action.

Halfway through they say, we wanted you to come alongside……  Grrr!  But it’s too late to make another line and fender change, so pragmatism wins the day and we park stern-to.  It’s the first time I’ve done this here.  I rely on Lori who says we’re “fine” (I’m beginning to like her definition of “fine”) at the front (i.e. back) while I manage the pointing and slowing down.

Soon we are snug (or as snug as we can be here) and settle down for a few days of work arising from our extended sea-trial and waiting out the strong winds that have started to blow down the Adriatic again.

We are in familiar territory with people who recognize us.  Lori demands pizza.

Lastovo

Lastovo is the most southerly and westerly island  in the Croatian archipelago. In this regard, it is the most expedient jumping-off point for the crossing to Italy.  Our weather is quite windy so we anticipate being here for a few days until we get favorable conditions for the 10-hour crossing to Italy. Another advantage of this comparatively short crossing is that we can comfortably cover the 60 miles in daylight.

First, to be clear, Lastovo is not a Jimmy Buffet kind of island. Far from it. Lastovo has only opened up to visitors in the last twenty years or so.  Prior to that, it was a military island that did not allow non-nationals ashore. But its remoteness means that it still feels a bit cut off from the other islands.  It is a three-hour ferry ride to the mainland and ferries capable of carrying cars rather thanjust  foot passengers are pretty infrequent.

The population of Lastovo is about 700 but this number is increased by tourists during the summer months.  Talking to the staff at our marina, one of them says that he stays here all year and in the winter he can go for days without seeing anyone to talk to. (I wonder how many volleyballs called "Wilson" are on the island).  It is also hard for the younger children; there is a primary school on the island but beyond that the kids have to spend five days a week in Split (3 hours away) and can only come home at the weekends during the school year. People here worry that the young are not developing roots on the island and will be less likely to stay in the future. Infrastructure development is equally problematic - building materials and construction workers have to be ferried to the island if you want to build or renovate anything - very expensive.

Zaklopatica

There are two really good places to park our boat on Lastovo - Zaklopatica to the north and Skrivena Luka to the south. This time we have chosen Skrivena Luka because the winds are coming from the north so we will get more shelter on the south side of the island. The restaurant and other facilities here are pretty good, so we will be comfortable throughout our stay.

Skrivena Luka

The little bay is remote from the main settlements on Lastovo but is a wonderful place to go for walks in the morning.  We get a few walks in and enjoy listening to the cicadas  and take in the local flora.  We pick some wild fennel (at least we think it is fennel - if it looks like fennel and smells like fennel then it must be fennel) and use it in our salads for the next few days. Lovely! We eat at the restaurant one night and Lori orders lamb shank (still prudently avoiding goat) and what comes is huge.  It must have come from a lamb that could happily double as a woolly pony.

We call this place "Big Chair" for some reason .....

Tp prepare for our departure, we have to provision and also check out with the harbormaster.  We gat a taxi ride across the island to the “main port”, Ubli (population 220). Getting the food is easy - fruit and vegetables fro a local stand and staples from a tiny supermarket. The Harbormaster is, as always, a little more challenging.  We go the the office during opening hours but it is closed.  We call the number on the door - no answer.  We call the “urgent” number on the door and get the Harbormaster in Dubrovnik (presumably the local harbormaster’s boss) who can offer no assistance but a recommendation to wait. We do and eventually the guy turns up and explains the process - we should come again on the evening before we leave and get our paperwork stamped.

The winemaker trying to avoid being in the picture

On the way back, we stop off at a tiny local winery (actually the basement of their house) and sample the basic red and white wines of the island.  We buy some and it is poured from the barrels into plastic containers for us to take away.  You get the feeling that this is how it has always been done and that you don’t get much closer to  the traditional approach than this.

Prior to our departure we  move our boat closer to the customs post in preparation for an early start the next day.  We walk to the Harbormaster’s office about two miles away.  It is closed and it is supposed to be open.  We sit in a little cafe and wait.  Everyone is watching the World Cup including a guy in uniform eating ice cream.  Lori says, “Is that the Harbormaster?” I say that it is not the guy I met the day before so probably not, he’s more likely the captain of the large ferry parked on the quay.

The game ends and we are still waiting outside the office.  The guy in uniform turns up and opens the office saying “I was sitting in the cafe”.  We know!  We know!! Still, what else did we have to do? The process is quick, friendly and does not involve us getting any piece of paper stamped - a first in all our travels.

And, "Yes, dear, you were right!"

We notify the customs that we would like to check out at 6:00 am the next morning.  They say, “Fine”. We arrive just before six but no border police are to be seen. We wait a polite amount of time and then call.  “No problem - we’ll be there in ten minutes”. They arrive; everyone again is friendly and happy; the process is quick and we are on our way before 6:30.

"Standing on a quay in Ubli, Croatia" doesn't sound right. You can see why the Eagles changed the lyrics ...

Our time here has been quite different that our previous two visits.  We have found the places we like in Croatia and know the places to avoid.  The people in the outer islands are much more friendly and relaxed than those who are close to the tourist invasion on the mainland and the inner islands. Better still, it’s not even been very hot.

On to Italy!

Mother Nature asserts herself

After our close encounter with the vengeful goats, Lori has been focusing on eating fish and lamb.

We make a smooth crossing to the island of Korcula where we will meet up with our friends Peter and Jane. Our destination is a little town called Vela Luka. We have been here before and frankly weren’t very impressed.  It was a scruffy little town with a dirty harbor and not much to say for itself.

What a difference a couple of years makes.  The harbor is cleaner, the town quay is well-organized and they have moved the location of their mooring buoys to create a focal point around which the town stretches. It still doesn’t have much to say for itself but it definitely feels pleasant and relaxed.

Jane and Peter were waiting for us in a little bay just outside the harbor and so pulled up alongside us on the town pier. It’s a small thing but it’s a little strange to have used our boat to get to a “meeting”.  I think as we started sailing we  first thought of it as a recreation (which it still is), then as a means of going on trips to specific places (Sicily, Malta etc) but this time we were using a boat as part of an everyday life pattern - meeting with friends.  When you do things like this you get a feeling for the lives of all those people who live on small islands and have to use their boats just to get by.

When we are on these trips we have a special travel credit card which gives us additional benefits when making currency conversions.  In the past, this has not worked tremendously reliably.  So this year Lori and I spent much time with our local Bank of America branch making sure that everything was set up correctly and all was good to go.

We try Lori’s card for the first time at an ATM tonight - “Invalid Pin”. She tries it again just in case she typed it incorrectly - “Invalid Pin”.  We try mine (which has a different pin) - “Invalid Pin;” “Your card is blocked until you contact your bank”

When you are 10 timezones away from your bank, with a different telephone system in a different language, this is not easy. “1-800” numbers don’t work internationally. Fortunately there is a workaround and we can call our bank “collect”. We do, and we have two of the most frustrating people on the other end who don’t fully understand the impact of the problem (no money in Croatia) and look at their records and can see none of the data that Lori laboriously added back in Scottsdale. Gnashing of teeth!

Their best suggestion is to wait for the pins to reset at 00:01 (EDT) and try again. Not convenient for dinner, but we agree to do so.

Next morning a little after the duly appointed time, we try again - “Invalid pin”. Aarghh!!!!

Lori calls again.  This time night has turned into day and we have a capable and competent person on the line who can’t understand why the folks last night couldn’t help us.  In ten minutes it’s fixed and we have access to our funds.

Dinner was lovely. I am really developing a liking for raw shrimp.  I have to resist the temptation to leap off our boat knife in my teeth to lock myself in a life and death struggle with vicious shrimp to bring them on board for dinner.  At least that's how I think it's done. Isn't it?  I saw the Sylvester Stallone movie - "Rocky III - Eye of the Tiger Shrimp".

We decide to spend a lazy day with our friends just hanging around it the little bay outside the harbor and then having dinner on board their boat. We use the time to pick the brains of Peter and John on sailing issues - these guys know more about sailing than we can ever expect to learn and even their casual observations sometime seem like deep insights to us. And they're really nice people too.

The weather is changing; winds are forecast to increase and stay strong for quite a few days. It’s time for us to part company - Peter will head south and we will continue north.  For us, the weather looks like it will restrict our ability to go as far as we would like. So we replan and head for one of our favorite restaurants on the island of Solta.  Mooring here is in a narrow cleft in the hills and the staff have to be creative in order to get the boats optimally parked.  But they’re good at it and we have a great dinner overlooking the moored boats.  The night is peaceful but we can hear the wind blowing over the hills above the inlet.  Poking our nose out into the open sea is going to be interesting. We decide to head south to the larger island of Hvar.

Out of the shelter of the island it’s blowing about 25 knots and the waves that are coming down the channel and are fortunately just a bit behind us and not fully on one side of the boat.  This means that we don’t get rolled over quite as much and the waves are actually helping us move forward.  It’s a bumpy and salty ride but as you can see it's only gilet weather (or as Lori would have it gicle weather) so it's not really that bad.

We expected this and didn’t put our sails up other than for a little bit of the main which we have out for stability.  It is always best to do this in advance rather than when the wind and waves are making life uncomfortable. So it’s surprising to see people heading out from the lee of the land with full sails and then going “It can’t be that bad ……Oh sh*t” and trying to sort it all out.

We get to Hvar and can’t park where we wanted to but we find an alternative that is a remarkable little natural harbor that has an excellent restaurant - some of the best food we’ve tasted in Croatia. 

Croatia is playing soccer in the World Cup, so we’re the only people looking out over the bay, the others have their backs to us watching the TV screen. Croatia wins, so it’s good night for everyone.

Again we are sheltered from the North winds, so there is a sense of impending doom as we head out into the next channel.  This time it’s over 30 knots and behaving like a gale; I’m looking at the waves and thinking of my Beaufort Wind Scale pictures and thinking this looks a lot like those Force 7 images. But True Colors takes it all in her stride and we make the crossing to Korcula with a little effort but without incident.

Beyond Korcula, as predicted, the wind dies and we can sail the last few miles to Lastovo which will be our jumping off point for Italy - but we may have to wait a few days for an appropriate weather window.

But we are fortunate, the bay in which we are moored is landlocked and surrounded by moderately-sized hills which will keep us sheltered from winds from almost any direction.

Lori, goats and REVENGE

In our (admittedly limited) experience, the transition from Montenegro to Croatia has been hard.  It’s a big day to check out of one country and into another with a longish distance between the ports of exit and entry and then onwards to somewhere for the night On top of that there has always been the change of attitude between the more easy going Montenegrins and the more stolid Croatians/Dalmatians.

But beware of extrapolating from limited data.

We tried to streamline the process of our exit from Montenegro. Some of you with experience of the former Yugoslavia are saying “Well that was your first mistake!”  And you are right.

Our idea was, as we have done in other countries (and even in Montenegro) before, to check out with the Harbormaster the night before and then with police and customs the morning of our departure.  The reason for this is that the Harbormaster has limited hours (many breaks) and they are never around early in the morning - often not before ten. A few years ago we had to delay our departure from Budva for 36 hours because the Harbormaster never turned up.

You’d think we’d learn. But, in our defense, Porto Montenegro is the epitome of modern forward-looking Montenegro.  Sure …. up to a point.

The marina helps us check out from the Harbormaster the night before we leave; we have our paperwork with the necessary stamps on it; I go to the Police the next morning.

The Police say “No.” The date is wrong; you can’t do that. We need a new stamp from the Harbormaster.

The Harbormaster is on break you knew that was coming didn’t you).  We will have to wait until 11:00, two hours after our planned departure time.

11:00 becomes 12:00 with nothing happening.  I go back to the marina folks and say "I would like to complain and I would like you to fix this”.

The look on their faces tells a story.  “This does not compute” comes to mind.  They had no way to handle the fact that their ”procedures” have failed. There is much shifting of feet and non-verbal “I’m not really here” communication going on.

At 12:45 they finally sort it out and say that they paid for a new cruising permit for us. The Harbormaster said that our permit had run out about noon time and that we’d have to have a new one.  The fact that it was his fault that the permit ran out was apparently irrelevant.

To be fair, we see a generational divide in Montenegro and Croatia; the older generation is still stuck in the Communist ways; the younger generation is not and really wishes the old one would step out of the way.

Croatian castle overlooking the entrance to the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro

Anyway, on to Croatia nearly four hours late.  This means we sail through a thunderstorm I had hoped to avoid - 25 knot gusts and torrential rain with no visibility except during the frequent  flashes of lightning.

But we make it into our Croatian port of entry (which is almost deserted because of the weather). And here we meet the younger generation of Croatians.  Carlo, the marinero is helpful and friendly; the police are all in their thirties and equally friendly and watching Croatia in the World Cup,  Croatia are doing well, so everything is fine.  The Harbprmaster is a young lady who is happy to help everything go smoothly and quickly.

So we leave our port of entry not quite as late as we might have been.  It’s still a long way to our mooring but we decide to shoot for it anyway.  We arrive close to 10:00pm and it’s dark.

Radar, AIS and knowledge derived from having been here before all help. But avoiding buoys in the dark is still a bit challenging.  Our restaurant folks come out to help us moor and say “Do you still want to eat?”

“Are you still open?”

“Of course, for our guests.”

Goat "under the bell" - we still think this needs more herbs

Sweaty and salty we have a lovely meal.  We’re the last people there but they are happy to talk with us and make us feel comfortable.

We sleep well and decide to stay a second day.

The social objective of this trip to Croatia is to meet up with Peter and Jane again who will have a new crew and be heading back down in our direction to reach Dubrovnik. We meander north to align with their schedule.  We spend a remote night at anchor under the stars with only seagulls and goats to keep us company.

Talking about goats, do you know the story of “Lori and the Vengeful Goats”?  It all started when Lori learned to sail in the BVI and was involved in the lucrative but highly dangerous goat-running trade.  That's a story she'd best tell you herself but the next episode took place about three or four years ago on the island of Ithaca in Greece.  We had dinner and Lori had goat stew - delicious.  Anyway, the next morning we are walking up on the hill behind the tiny harbor and we come upon a herd of goats. It was OK for a while until we came across numero uno goat. All his ladies were behind him and so a macho gesture was needed. He looked at Lori and snorted; we moved more cautiously forward and he emitted a mixture of a hiss and a grunt. For other goats and apparently Lori as well, this is very intimidating.

Lori decides 1) that we can’t go any farther and 2) that he smells the goat from last night on her breath and he is angry about the untimely demise of his cousin.  Logic is of no use in such circumstances so we beat a dignified retreat.

Incident over, or so we thought.

So, the night before our anchorage on this trip, Lori and I eat goat.  And tonight, out of nowhere, a little string of goats appears on the land - all of them looking at Lori. The leader does not look happy.

“They know!” she says. “Goats can’t swim.  Can they???”

Fortunately it appears not.  Lori sneaks away incognito and lives to eat goat another day.

The goats were foiled this time but they disappeared muttering like "Wait till next time. We will build a raft!"

Four points of contact

As I said before, Montenegro is considered the newest country in the world.  It was formed after the break-up of Yugoslavia.  It has a population of about 625,000 with a very diverse cultural heritage.  It was not, and still isn’t, a particularly advanced nation in the European context.  There’s a lot of farming and people seem to live simple lives with a lot of tradition woven through them.

So it’s interesting to see how it has approached opening up to visitors.

Our four stops in Montenegro represent the good and the bad of four different approaches to the influx of tourists. As I said in the last blog, Budva took the mass-tourism route leveraging it’s little Venetian walled old town.  On top of that (figuratively-speaking) it has added resort-style hotels, discos, bus tours etc. which give it a very cosmopolitan atmosphere without being particularly Montenegrin in any strong sense.

Bigova Marina

Bigova, our second stop, took a very different approach.  It’s no more than ten miles from Budva (by land or sea) but it could be in a different world.  The little hamlet has only about 70 permanent residents but this grows to about 1000 in the summer.  The guy who took us over to the restaurant from our mooring said everything to the left of the restaurant was for tourists and everything to the right was where locals lived. The clan system is alive and well - all 70 locals have the same surname! Our ferryman said he could make more money in Budva, but why would he leave? The restaurant has laid the moorings for about 15 boats and they’d like you to eat at their restaurant but aren’t really adamant about that.  We enjoyed their locally caught calamari and octopus as the sun went down over the bay..

Kotor has another approach. Its Venetian walled town (larger than Budva) is one of the pearls of the Adriatic with a fortress high on the mountain behind it. The location is spectacular in the only fjord in the southern part of Europe. (it’s not really a fjord, but it really looks like one.)

Meredith, Kotor is famous for its CATS (the animals not the boats).  So this one's for you .....

The drama of our week in Montenegro came as we arrived in Kotor.  The weather here has been what the forecasters call “unsettled”.  This means hot days interspersed with cold days or rainy days and fairly frequent thunderstorms.  This tends to mean a fairly energetic wind pattern.

That’s what we had when we tried to park in Kotor - 20 knots of wind  more or less blowing us straight onto the quay as we tried to park. The important phrase here to keep an eye on is “more or less”.

The more attentive of you will recall that True Colors is very susceptible to any hint of a cross-wind when she’s backing up.  This is usually counteracted by accelerating a bit to maintain control of the boat.  If you do this when the wind is behind you “helping”, the real question is “How do you stop,?”

We were doing well slowing down nicely and about 10 feet out from the dock when that little component of the wind that was less behind us than the others took over.  True Colors turned gently sideways and drifted nicely alongside onto the quay. In some ways we were lucky that there was enough space to do this but in others if there had been boats adjacent to us this never would have happened.

As we were coming to terms with the issue and trying to think how it could be solved, three charter skippers from adjacent boats leapt on board and expertly manhandled True Colors into her proper orientation.  A very professional maneuver for which we were very grateful and more than a little impressed. Fortunately no damage was done to us or any of the adjacent boats.

Although it has a relatively tiny quay, Kotor does its best to encourage visits from cruise ships - very large cruise ships (hopefully not parked by someone like me).  The effect is much the same as that in Venice: a city block parks next to and dwarfs the historic buildings.  The scale is wrong; nothing feels right.  Flocks of passengers (up to three thousand at a time) spend only four or five hours in the place and then go back to the boat in time for dinner and an overnight voyage to their next port.

Our favorite Lebanese restaurant in Montenegro

Finally, there is Porto Montenegro. This is a former naval base that has been completely re-designed and built as a five-star luxury resort. They may have nailed it.  This is the only place I have ever seen a Rolex shop - not a shop that sells Rolex watches but a shop that ONLY sells Rolex watches.  The same goes for the Veuve Clicquot shop next door - only one brand of Champagne?!? I guess that these are the kind of things that tempt you to step off your super-yacht and visit planet Earth.

I worry that the place and the normal local people get lost in this equation and that the gulf between “haves” ad “have-nots” is rapidly widening everyday, everywhere.

We will set out tomorrow for Croatia.

As different as night and day

It appears that this applies to sea trials as as other aspects of life.

The downside of our re-planned route is that Brindisi - Budva is an overnight sail. Not a particularly difficult one but long enough to warrant attention.  The trip was quiet. The wind wasn’t strong enough to sail, so we motor-sailed (with the mainsail up and the engine for you non-sailors) which added more stability and a little more speed.

At night we use radar to detect other vessels in the vicinity.  The new instruments are pretty smart and project where vessels are going to be and what their closest point of approach to our projected position will be. Simple math but very helpful.  The instruments tell you when a vessel is “dangerous”  (i.e. is going to come close to you).  You get a list of the top 3.  Well, at the top of our list was “True Colors” i.e. ourselves. Now many people have said that we’re just a danger to ourselves but it pretty bad when your instruments start to tell you this too. 

What had happened was that the instruments were not set up to recognize and ignore our proximity to ourselves. A simple configuration fix but one that is more difficult in the dark. We decided to ignore it and fix it in the morning. a few more items ended up on the morning to -do list.

It was a partly cloudy but otherwise beautiful morning as we approached Budva. The first major parking was a two-for-one job. First alongside on the customs quay to check into the country; then stern-to in our own berth. The customs and border formalities are done pretty well but the harbormaster who will give us our touring permit is elusive. Indeed he has been elusive each time we come here and he has been sometimes equally hard to find for some of our friends.  I suspect it’s because he works here and also at Bar a ways down the coast.

Anyway he’s not here so the formalities proceed without him.  When I mention this in the office, the young lady gives a long-suffering sigh.  I say “We’ve been here before.”  And she says, “Then you understand my problem.” I do.

We move over to our berth and I meet up with the harbormaster later - a nice guy who seems to enjoy his job (maybe a little too much).

We’re in Budva for two nights - one to help us catch up on sleep and one to take a look around. Remember the need for planning “flexibility” while sailing and I’ll come back to the reality in a moment.

We liked Budva the times we were here before.  It’s a resort town which is the heart of the Adriatic Riviera.  “Riviera” can mean a couple of things - think Benidorm vs Biarritz.  We wanted to see which way Budva went.  Sadly it seems to have gone the mass-tourism (Benidorm) route rather than the elegant Biarritz route.

The marina that used to have young guys and women in cute polo shirts attending to boats and on-shore requirements now has a few marineros who are only sometimes available to help boats moor. On the quay by the walled old town there are five restaurants - two of them are Chinese restaurants. You think “Why?” And then you see the flocks of Asian tourists being shepherded around in groups under the control of a sheep-dog with a flag.

The old town is still quaint and can be enjoyed in the morning when not too many folks are up and about.

Getting back to that need for “flexibility”. After we dock, we turn on the shore power and our AC and little by little the batteries go crazy.  This was supposed to have been fixed and is a potentially serious issue.  We switch off the shore power and email the mothership back in Brindisi.  The word “Urgent” is in the title.  Apart from the conclusion that this shouldn’t be happening, we are all at a loss.  The best plan is to get someone local to come look at it, but that won’t be until tomorrow.  So we spend a hot day and night trying to conserve our batteries. Fortunately our solar panels are working well and can keep up with the load fairly easily.

The next day two Russian guys arrive and, after much investigation, they say that our chargers are putting too much power into our batteries.  Odd since they are both matched.  I get them to speak to the installation guy in Brindisi.  They disagree but the Russian “solution” is a prudent approach. So we do it.

Everything is back on and the night is uneventful and everything seems to be OK. But if this happens again we’re going back to Brindisi to get it properly sorted out. Our yard has been great so far and this was not their work but that of a sub-contractor.  Let’s see how they step up to the issue.

Finally, i seem to be making political comments at the end of the blogs this year.  I promise this is not a trend, but I couldn’t resist this one.  We have discovered the British PM’s secret post-Brexit plan.

Maybe she can handle getting out of the marina better than she is handling getting Britain out of Europe!

Trials and Preparations

The day of the sea trial has finally arrived

As we leave the pontoon we have one of our boatyard owners and his chief technician on board. They are being very thorough - checking things like the engine temperature as we progress through the trial.

We suspect not accidentally have we left at the time that the Brindisi - Corfu regatta is about to start. This is a 20-hour sailing race that goes from here to Greece.  It’s a journey we’ve made a number of times.  if we get the right crew, maybe we can do it one year. Anyway to the casual observer we look like we ARE part of the race.  The race press boat comes by and takes our picture. 

We change our plan.  We have a good crew. We can join the race.  Lori takes over at the helm and after a perfectly timed start we are on our way.  Soon True Colors is living up to her name and leaving the rest of the fleet in her wake.  We are good at this!!

“Wake up, Lori, wake up!”  Lori’s daydream abruptly vanishes.

Back in reality, we thread our way through the gathering boats and out of the harbor.  Massimo, the shipyard owner says “We can’t go back until all the race boats have cleared the harbor”.  Sounds like an excuse for a jaunt to me!  The wind is a nice 12-15 knots and from a perfect direction for a good sail.  No-one demurs. The sails go up quickly and soon True Colors is doing between 7.5 and 9.5 knots is a sea that’s a little bit rolly.

We test all the major systems - chartplotter, autopilot, AIS, VHF and radar - and everything seems to be working fine. Indeed the whole trial only shows up a couple of minor things that need to be either fixed or completed.  The boatyard and the specialists have done a really good job.

As always, there’s a complication.  Our agent and friend, another Massimo, comes by to warn us about a change to (or changed interpretation of) the EU VAT rules on boats.  The situation is fluid and unclear. “Fluid” and “unclear” are words that the maritime bureaucrats in Croatia (our next destination) are not at all comfortable with.  They prefer strict rules and seem to like to fine you when you could conceivably be interpreted as having broken them.  It is all part of their “Welcome to Croatia” program. 

So Montenegro will be our new destination. Right next door to Croatia but as different as night and day.  Friendly and helpful people who seem to enjoy their role as the newest country in the world.

The weather for the weekend looks a bit too windy and unpredictable to make for a comfortable crossing, so we plan to leave on Monday.  This gives us a few days to relax and get all our final preparations made.

True Colors is spruced up and looking about as good as we can remember her doing. We have given her a new ensign to complete her ensemble.

This weekend it’s the first round of local elections in Italy.  We don’t have TV on the boat so can’t really say what the ads look like and what the coverage is but it’s nice to see a more tangible election campaign.  There are billboards everywhere with pictures of the candidates, flyers are under the windshield wipers of cars and there’s an open-air meeting in the town square.

It turns out we vaguely know one of the candidates - did I tell that Brindisi was a little town? He runs the wine store for the family vineyard from which we buy our wine. We hear this from his daughter who is also working in the wine store this summer. Opinion polls can’t be a big thing in these elections. We ask her if her dad will win and she says she has no idea.

Thinking about elections and candidates (and the problems we seem to have with these in the States) reminds me of a term we’ve heard used here a lot - “A serious person”. While this clearly means just what it says, it has a much deeper connotation  It means “trustworthy”, “honorable”, “good to do business with”, “more aware of the broader picture than just self-interest”. And to be branded "not a serious person" is a major black mark on one's character.

Hopefully, these elections in Brindisi will elect “serious persons”.   Maybe we could learn something from this perspective too.

We're back on board True Colors

It was a very challenging winter.  We had to be annoyingly persistent to get Pantaenius (our insurance company) to pay what was due. If you remember the irritating alarm that we had sounding all the time for the six days that we limped home last season (the most annoying noise in the world), then I was close to the second most annoying noise in the world as far as Pantaenius was concerned. It should not be so hard to get what we pay for in our premiums.

However, the work was finally started in November and it appears to be substantially completed. New instruments are installed; new (and much more sane) cabling has been laid; new gauges are looking at us from the control panel.  This translates into two words - “learning curve”. While the functionality is moderately enhanced due to the new technology, it is all hidden behind new user interfaces - where’s our UX-designer daughter Meredith when we need her!?!

It will be the sea trial tomorrow when we and the folks from the yard take the boat out onto the water and see if things really work the way they’re supposed to.  We are nervous but confident(-ish).

It is great to be back in Brindisi.  The town is not the most picturesque in this part of Puglia but our familiarity with it is helping us appreciate its dusty laid-back atmosphere.  I can now drive reliably from one side of the town to the other! The old center is a maze of little streets barely wide enough for a car (or sometimes two). Add a one-way “system” to that and it’s a recipe for going round in increasingly crabby circles (me, not Lori, or so she says).  But this year it all clicked - we can now get to parking places close to the center. Local folks look at us and say “what was your problem?”

For the first few nights we stayed off the boat in a little masseria about 15 kilometers from the boatyard. A masseria is a large farmhouse complex typically dating from the 16th - 18th centuries when parcels of land in Puglia were given to Spanish noblemen (I’m not sure why) who used these buildings to grow and store their food. Most of these buildings are substantial and some are fortified - I suspect the locals weren’t too happy about these foreigners living off their land.

These properties are great for agri-tourism. Our masseria produces its own wine, olive oil and preserves. It is rightfully well-known for its Italian farmhouse cooking and was a perfect place to de-stress after the winter.

Sorry, Clive, with this competition, you just didn't make the cut!

Our social calendar is already operational. We met up with our friends Peter and Jane and their friends Alison and Clive.  Peter and Jane keep their boat in Greece in the same yard that we kept True Colors for the first few years.  They are on their way to Montenegro and Croatia and we managed to have our routes intersect in Brindisi. A great dinner in a great seafood restaurant with much conversation and story-swapping.  The good news is that we will be heading to Croatia just a little after them (all going well) and we aim to meet up somewhere in the islands near Split later this month.

Finally, we have two new crew members this year.  Lori’s mom worries about us while we’re away and she gave us two medallions of appropriate saints to protect us on our voyages.  (And, yes, we ARE wearing them, BJ) While we are most grateful for the spiritual support, we are hoping that these are the “Mother Teresa” kind of saints who aren’t averse to getting their sleeves rolled up and pulling on a line or two when the time comes.

How not to spend your summer

I know we’ve been quiet, but really not much has happened at our end and some things we had hoped to have happen can’t happen.  Sadly this phase is more “making the best of things” rather than “doing the best of things”.

We’re still in Brindisi.  We’ve been here now for over a month.  The impact of the lightning on True Colors has been slowly becoming more apparent as time has gone on.  The boat is sound but the electronics and electrical equipment are in a precarious state.  We have had experts out to assess the situation and we are in the process of getting the necessary work started and funded by our insurance company.  Everything has been slow here because it is August and much of Italy is on vacation with suppliers closed and/or unavailable for most of the month.  Our yard, however, continues to be excellent but we must get the work going soon.

We have had to cancel our trip to Croatia and Montenegro (sorry, Nancy) and our latter days here may have to be on land (sorry, Meredith and Alasdair).  I suppose this is what happens when you choose to live so close to Mother Nature but it remains a huge source of frustration and disappointment.

But the boat must be safe and reliable and this is my priority.

On the positive side, I now know a lot more about my boat than I did last year.  Also, you get to see True Colors from a whole different perspective.

This is number 3 in our short series of “Where’s evidence of Lori in this picture?”  And this is a trick question…..

OK for all those of you who said Lori must be taking the picture, you don’t know our leading lady very well.  Neither deep under the water nor high above the water work at all for her - at a gut-wrenching panic kind of level.  But she has found her true “Goldilocks solution” at the surface of the water. (BTW please notice the quality of the parking - that is NOT a lot of space on either side!!! And, of course, there was a cross-wind.)

So we have continued to make excursions on land - part in preparation for Meredith and Alasdair’s visit and part to keep us from going crazy.  By train, we have visited Lecce, Polignano a Mare (where Alasdair’s parent will be staying) and Bari which is renowned for its shopping (more on that later).  We’ve visited each of these places before but have taken the opportunity to spend more time in these places than our typical itinerary would allow.

Lecce is a classic little city - “the Florence of the South” and you can see why it’s called that.  It’s also a college town and it has something of an Edinburgh feel to it.  That is if you can imagine Edinburgh in temperatures of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit - difficult I know.  It’s the classical building styles (in Lecce’s case original and in Edinburgh’s neo-classical) but you feel that the city planners would have understood each other perfectly.

“Street food” is a big deal in the south of Italy.  People say it was “invented” in Palermo but we didn’t get to try any there.  There’s a vendor near our shipyard here in Brindisi but, just as we were about to visit, he closed up shop (for what we hope is just his annual vacation).  But Lecce has street food too but, because of the narrow streets, it is not so much “street” food as “close to the street in a little bar/restaurant kind of place” food.  Nevertheless we had two very excellent panini-type sandwiches in one - perfect for lunch.

It also has a wonderful old-style paper and pen shop. So Lori can indulge me with a beautiful journal that one day I may be brave enough to write in!

Polignano a Mare (Polignano on Sea, for any British readers) is a quintessential old Italian seaside resort.  It has a lovely old town with the typical narrow alleyways opening into tiny squares. 

In the three or so years since we first visited the town it has been moving decidedly more upmarket with improved restaurants, craft shops and an astonishing number of B&B/s in the old houses in the historic center.  

The town itself has a beautiful location perched on the top of cliffs that are burrowed out with caves. 

Some of these caves have been made into spectacular restaurant dining rooms that you pay for with high prices and mediocre service.  Check out TripAdvisor before you choose to visit one of these!

But the town proper has some wonderful seafood restaurants and we have enjoyed excellent Puglian specialties - raw seafood (tuna, swordfish, etc.) is especially good. And, for those of you old enough to remember Dean Martin, the song “Volare” that he popularized in the US it was originally sung by Domenico Modugno who was born in this town and has a statue in a little square on the southern edge of the seafront.

Bari is the “big city” in these parts.  It is about 70 miles or so north of Brindisi but easily accessible by the train service that runs all the way along the coast. It’s a major seaport (like Brindisi) but doesn’t have much of an old town to speak of.

And this is BEFORE she's seen the shops

However, to Lori’s delight, it has a very upscale shopping district that you have to pass through to get to the historic part (now, who planned that, I wonder).  Also, being August, those shops that are open at all are all having sales. A blouse and a purse later, Bari has lived up to its reputation as far as Lori is concerned.

One problem here is that, because it is not really a tourist town, restaurants close in August too (because all their customers have gone on vacation).  So we have had some difficulty in finding good restaurants that are open.  However we did find another excellent seafood place and one serving traditional Puglian specialties cooked superbly well.

in the next weeks, we’ll try to get back to some of the local hill-towns that we visited last time. All the while hoping that we will start to make faster progress on getting True Colors ready to sail again.

It's always good to find a safe harbor ...

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!

How can you tell when your wife is tired, really tired?

So it’s about 260 miles back to Brindisi and our best source of repair services.  We are retracing our steps from earlier in the season and going back along the Jasmine Coast which, if you recall, is a “coast of passage”.  This means long days without the autopilot and therefore one or other of us at the helm all the time.

The first leg is back to Roccella Ionica.  We are cutting across the southern entrance to the Straits of Messina and then hugging the coast for a while.  It is supposed to be a calm sail but there is a good breeze blowing down the Straits and we can get the sails up.  Soon I am helming True Colors as she slides across the swell at about 8 knots.  This is good for many reasons - the engine is not on and the annoying alarm is off, I have something interesting to do, and the sailing is great.

This goes on for about an hour and a half and then, within the space of a very few minutes, the wind dies away to nothing and we must be resigned to motoring (with the annoying alarm) for the rest of the way.

Again, if you’re keeping track, you will remember that Roccella Ionica is one of those places where the pilot book and the local advice differ.  The pilot book says there’s a sand bar and silting and the marina folks say there’s not.  They were right for our first visit but now I have the fun of navigating a shallow entrance without the benefit of instruments.

“Keep to the middle”, they say, we do, and we’re fine - just don’t look down through the clear turquoise water and see how close the bottom is!

When we were here last the restaurant wasn’t yet open and the wi-fi which didn’t reach to our berth was about to be upgraded. We expected to find the restaurant open (and it was) but were were skeptical about the wi-fi upgrade.  It was down when we arrived but this was due to the same storm we had had in Riposto.  There were people fixing it as we berthed and soon they were fully operational again.  The storm had struck one of their buildings and set a small dinghy on fire.  Fortunately no-one was hurt.

The restaurant serves pizza by the meter.  You can get 1/2 meter of full meter-long pizzas. You can guess who wanted one!

Hint: She's the one on the right

We stayed an extra day not only to recover from the 12-hour day before but also to see ifIi could poke around at anything to see if I could bring any systems back.  No luck but the day off was welcome.

An early start with a little bit of drama.   We usually slip our lines round a cleat so that they don’t hang us up when we leave but this time the marineros from the marina had tied our lines.  They could still slip but one was tied on the other side of our pontoon rather than close to the boat.  No real problem unless it sticks which, of course, it did,  Lori tried to flick it off but managed to catch on the other horn of the cleat.  So for a few seconds (long ones) it looked liked we were snagged and our stern was drifting slowly towards the dock and the boat next to us.  But we pulled hard on the line to create some slack and managed to flip the line off before we made contact with anything around us.  So much for “Be cool, look cool” - 0 for 2 on that one.

We hug the coast a bit and then head out across the Gulf of Squillace.  It was pretty windy here the last time and everyone says it’s always windy here, so we are hopeful.  But not a breath of wind and we motor with the annoying alarm all the way across the gulf.

A moment for useless but interesting trivia.  Squillace has an ancient tradition of making pottery.  The style is created by putting a white layer on top of the earthenware and once it dries they scrape off the desired areas to  create the designs that you see.  This technique is called graffiti in Italian. The origin of the same word in English.

We have to work out a way to get here sailing/  Looks tricky but might be worth it.

We’re heading back to our nice little mooring in a small bay on Cape Rizzuto.  We're concerned that we are now into the full summer season and it will be more crowded than the last time.  “Plan B” is not ideal - it involves going into a harbor we don’t know which is, you guessed it, just a bit on the shallow side in places.  But we don’t need it, the three buoys are empty.  Lori is worried about the depth but I point out that it was OK last time so, if we take the same buoy, it’ll be OK this time too.  But the large rocks we can clearly see on the bottom are a little unsettling. 

A refinement of our buoy lassoing technique is a huge improvement.  We are on and secure in about five minutes.  We look at each other and can’t quite believe it.  “Be cool and look cool” is back!

Another day, another gulf.  This time it’s the Gulf of Taranto.  This is another 70-mile day across open water that leaves us out of sight of land and soon also out of cell coverage.  “Out of sight of land” is not usually any kind of issue, but, when you have no instruments other than your compass, it is incredibly boring, like really incredibly boring to stare at a compass needle for hours on end with the annoying alarm adding to your pleasure. We see very few other boats, so we don’t have even that as a highlight.

Approaching Santa Maria de Leuca

But with glazed expressions and frazzled brains we make it to Santa Maria de Leuca.  We will stay two days here by executive order of the captain - three days in a row would be very bad.

Due to the runaway success of our last "Where's Lori?" competition, can you spot the evidence of Lori in this photograph of True Colors?  

A great seafood lunch on the second day does a lot to revive our spirits - never under-estimate the power of tuna tartare!  

On a personal note, this lunch marks a milestone for me.  All my life I’ve had this “hate-hate” relationship with fried calamari.  I think it is rubbery and tasteless but Lori loves is and thinks that I just haven’t had the good stuff.  So on this trip I started with trying a little bit of the examples that she particularly liked, then I graduated to sharing a fried calamari starter with her and, today, I ordered it all by myself - just for me.  OK I admit it, it’s pretty good when you get the good stuff (which is of course what they have here).

The last day; 60 miles north to Brindisi. We had thought of breaking it into two legs but there’s weather coming and we decide to push on even with the annoying alarm.

It’s weird, we are now in high season and for the whole 60 miles we see only three sailing boats.  We see almost no marine traffic at all even when we approach Brindisi.  We both have the same thought “Has there been some kind of cataclysm that we don’t know about? Has the world ended?”. Shades of “On the Beach” (good movie by the way).  Or on the brighter side maybe there’s some major football match that everyone feels compelled to watch., But none of the above, it’s just quiet.  Maybe too quiet but there goes our paranoia again….

We tie up elegantly alongside in the almost deserted boatyard and feel relieved that it is over and we don’t have to listen to the annoying alarm any more.  But the weekend watchman emerges and says “You can’t park there!  I need you to move about a boat’s length down the dock.”  No amount of “You’ve got to be kidding” looks, gestures and broken Italian makes any difference.  We half-pull, half-nudge True Colors forward to where he wants us. And we are done in more ways than one.

This is what a really tired Lori looks like.  She's too tired even to be grumpy.

By the way, did I forget to mention how annoying the alarm was?

We encounter a whale, survive a storm and meet the Captain of the Seven Seas

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.

Siracusa - Relativity, Reuse and a Riot

Siracusa (more specifically Ortygia its old town) is 2700 years old. It is mentioned in the Bible (St. Paul stopped here) and by the Roman writer Cicero. To put 2700 years into some kind of context, Siracusa had been in existence for over 2000 years when Columbus discovered America, over 1500 years before the Crusades and almost 1000 years before the first recorded use of the term, “Pope”. So, relatively speaking, Siracusa is definitely “old”.

There are three places to park a boat in Siracusa.  The first and most attractive is the large bay to its south; the second is a “marina” on the town quay that borders the bay; and finally the small harbor to the north that sits on the boundary between the old and new towns.  The forecast winds are from the south for a day or so and the first two options are susceptible to weather from this direction, so we opt for the third.  The pilot book says that this harbor smells pretty bad in the summer. But, while doing my research for where to stay, I come across some protests in Italian that this information is out of date and that the situation is much better. 

We stay here for three days and can confirm that, even in nearly 100 degree heat, there is no evidence of a bad smell.  And on the positive side, it is so sheltered that you almost cannot tell that there is any weather at all.

As you might imagine, there are quite a few things to see here. Walking across the bridge into the old town, Siracusa makes its first statement with the Temple of Apollo. This 6th century BC Greek temple, was transformed into a Byzantine church, then into an Islamic mosque and back again to a church.

This theme of revision or adaptation of buildings and sites to “new” uses or purposes is typical of this part of the world where cultures, religions and architectural styles have rubbed against each other for hundreds of years.  It is continued with the Duomo (or cathedral). This was built in the 7th century on top of the much older Greek Temple of Athena.

The 7th century church was revised by the Normans (especially the ceiling).

And the facade was rebuilt in the 18th century.

The town itself is a warren of little streets and alleyways trying to maintain an equilibrium between cars (for which they were not intended) and pedestrians (for which they were).

And occasionally you burst from the narrow lanes into one of the piazzas and you feel that you can suddenly breathe more easily and slow the pace even further down to sit and enjoy coffee, ice cream or a cool drink under the umbrellas.

Some way away from Ortygia old town is Neapolis (or “new town”) which was one of the original quarters of the town of Siracusa in Greek and Roman times.  As a result, we find Greek and Roman ruins side-by-side sprawling across a vast area. 

The Greek theater (which is still used for performances today) is adjacent to a Roman amphitheater and the site of the stone quarries that were used to create the buildings themselves.

Former stone quarries are not usually high on my must-see list when visiting a country, but here is a worthy exception.  The quarrying work left a sunken space which is now shaded by orange and lemon trees and is amazingly fragrant and peaceful for an area that is in the middle of a bustling modern town. 

In this space is a cavern called the Ear of Dionysius, which is remarkable for its acoustics. Apparently a whisper at one end of the cavern can be clearly heard at the other.  But today, as we approach, it is a male choir singing early church music - surreal and sublime.

As an aside here, this cavern is called the "Ear of Dyonisius". He was an early ruler in Sicily and his official title was "tyrant" and this is where the English usage of the term in its modern sense originates.

Talking about music brings me to the third part of this entry - the riot. There are not many paragraphs that combine the topics of opera and riots so these will add substantially to that body of work. There is to be a performance of the opera Carmen in Siracusa tonight. It should have been in the Greek theater but they are doing some work on it and we have to “make do” with the 11th century castle that just out into the bay as the "back-up" venue.

First of all it’s hard to get tickets.  It’s not that the tickets are hard to get, it’s that it’s hard to find someone that sells them.  It’s too late for online; we look at the few points of sale and can’t find any of them; we try a travel agent and he says that the opera is not on in Siracusa at all.  But we will not be thwarted - seeing a French opera performed live in the open air in Sicily is not something you give up on easily. (OK I know it should be an Italian opera sung in Italian but you can’t have everything.)

I have a plan.  I suggest that we go for lunch near the venue and don’t tell Lori of the subplot which will either reveal a box-office or a source of information on where we can actually buy tickets. Apart from the fact that the restaurant is closed, this plan works well.  We not only discover a box office, we also discover members of the chorus selling their personal complimentary tickets to the public at discounted prices.  We buy two.  It crosses our mind that this could be a scam but, we argue, if you’re reduced to scamming tickets for an opera in Siracusa in Sicily, you can’t be a very successful or self-respecting scammer at all.  Anyway, they’re wearing t-shirts that say they’re part of the opera staff - so it must be OK!?!

The doors to the venue are supposed to open at 7:30 and the opera is to start at 8:30. It is outside so the doors are just wooden gates that let you in to the castle grounds.  Well, they would let you in if they were unlocked that is.

The crowd continues to gather.

It is 8:20 and the gates are still not open.  The local carabinieri (police) are just hanging about chatting and trying to look official. Local customs are sometimes disconcerting.  In Italy, when people greet friends they kiss each other first on the right cheek and then on the left.  This applies to both women and men. So it applies to carabinieri too. In how many countries in the world do armed police officers kiss each other when they meet? It’s always good to have your cultural foundations tested.

But back to the opera and the riot.  People are not happy.  In another part of the world, they might say "the crowd is turning ugly." But this is Italy and that just isn't possible - here they just pout, out loud. 

Someone has the idea of pounding on the entrance gates with his hands; he is joined by others; it becomes rhythmical; clapping from the back of the crowd joins in to the same beat. The gates start to show signs of strain.

Watch the video.

Prudently someone opens them and the audience good-naturedly streams through.

All the while the carabieris have done …. nothing.  They don’t even look concerned. “Normale!”

The opera is pretty good but we don’t see all of it because of the late start and our desire to be off early the next day.

No Plan Survives Contact with the Ocean

A weather pattern has been setting in where it is calm in the morning and then the wind picks up in the afternoon - picks up to the level where you (or at least I) have to pay attention when I have to moor the boat.  It’s OK if it is not a crosswind, but if it is, it can get tricky.

We head for San Leone and, by the time we get there, it’s definitely a cross-breeze of about 12 knots but we get ourselves on to the pontoon without much trouble.  Lori is concerned where our lazy line appears to be coming from.  Typically they come from in front of the boat back the the bow.  Our starboard line seems to be coming from the side.  We query this twice, but the marina folks say this is fine. We are not so sure, but try. to rationalize this configuration.  We keep a wary eye open in this direction.

Sure enough, when the wind gets up to 20 knots or so, the lazy line suddenly goes slack and True Colors is twisting backwards towards the dock.  I switch the engine on and push her into forward to keep her from hitting.  I then use the bow thruster to let Lori take up the slack in the lazy line.  We call the marina and someone comes to help us attach a breast line that will doubly secure us from gusts from the prevailing wind.  It is fine but untidy.  The lazy line must have been caught on something below the water and sprung loose when the wind strengthened. We eat on board. Eventually the wind dies and the night is peaceful.

The next morning we tighten everything up even more and determine to be on board when the wind kicks up again.

Our main reason for coming to San Leone is to visit Agrigentum (or Agrigento as it is now called). This is the site of a city founded by the ancient Greeks around 580 BC. Most of the old city is still unexcavated but what has been unearthed is quite special.  Most of the remains are concentrated in the “Valley of the Temples”. This is unique as far as valleys go because it’s actually a ridge. But fortunately the temples do exist and there are seven of them in the Doric style.

Many people consider these to be the finest Greek temples found anywhere outside of Greece and some people consider them to be on a par with those in Athens.  The main difference is that, while the ones in Athens were built of marble, these are built from the local stone.

We had expected, particularly on this traverse of the Sicilian south coast, to see evidence of the migrant issue.  But it has been almost invisible.  However, here in San Leone, police are everywhere.  Apparently the Libyan foreign minister and the Italian foreign minister are meeting in town to discuss possible solutions. Our cab driver is poilte about the problem but clearly feels strongly that the rest of Europe should be doing more to help Italy which seems to be bearing the brunt of the problem.

The weather pattern is intensifying with even stronger winds for a period each afternoon.  More concerning is the forecast for Force 6 winds with gusts to Force 7 for Saturday, Sunday and Monday.  This is when we were thinking about going round our final cape on Sicily.  This is not looking like a good plan.

The challenge now is do we go round the cape earlier and get into better weather on the east coast of Sicily or do we dawdle along the south coast and go round after the rough weather. We can afford to play this by ear for a day or two all the while hoping that the evolving forecast will point to the best answer.

We move on to Licata, a nice modern marina about halfway along the bottom of Sicily.  The wind for parking is 16 knots on the beam.  We are, of course, directed to a berth that is completely exposed to this wind. But we manage to park pretty well and settle in for the night.  We are still concerned about the weather.  We have four forecasting apps, and they are disagreeing about what to expect.  What they don’t disagree on is that going earlier rather than later is likely a good idea.

The next marina is Ragusa.  We get here in the afternoon and again it is 16 knots on the beam and again we are directed to a berth that has no shelter from the wind. But again we park pretty neatly.  Our plan had been to stay here for three or four days and explore the interior, but this is not going to happen due to the weather.

Ragusa is a lively little seaside resort witha good stretch of beach.  When we go out for dinner at about 8:00 (early for Italians) people are still playing on the beach and the evening stroll is just starting. We eat our meal people-watching (one of Lori’s favorite pastimes).

Now it’s time for a lesson in the realities of sailing planning.  Those of you who like a quiet organized life may want to close your eyes for this part.

We decide to leave early the next morning to give us plenty of time to get round the cape.  When we arrived the marina credit card system was down, so they said not worry we could pay them when we leave.  We want to leave at 7:00 and when we go to the office it is closed and won’t open till 8:30.  There goes the early start.  At 7:00, the wind is generally almost non-existent and this makes it a great time for leaving smoothly.  By 8:30, it is 11 knots and, you guessed it, blowing across our beam again.  No problems on the exit but just a lot more care and attention needed.

The wind is supposed to blow from the west and this part goes according to plan.  We get some nice downwind sailing.  Three of our four weather models show the wind picking up and then dropping later in the day.  Our newest source says that it will pick up but will not abate until late evening. No prizes for working out which one turns out to be right.

So our easy rounding of the cape turns into a motor-sail at 7.5 knots with a 20+ knot wind at our back and a following sea.  At this point it’s more fun than annoying.   When we turn the corner into the more sheltered water the wind continues to strengthen peaking at about 27 knots and consistently blowing at 23.  It means we can sail but with a reduced main. 7 knots on a broad reach - nice.

What’s not nice is the sea.  It has followed us round the cape.  The land should have reduced the wave height if the waves had continued to come from the same direction.  Instead the waves are coming all the way from Africa and are getting larger. The swell is about five or six feet in height.  The really good part is that it’s not in front of us - bashing through that would not be a happy time.

We were going to go into a little harbor just up the east coast but it’s blowing 23+ knots and I don’t feel like that kind of adventure.  Our speed has made us early, so we decide to push on up to Syracuse - effectively compressing two days into one.

The weather continues unabated for another three or so hours as we travel north.  By the time we round the headland going towards the bay, the waves are starting to feel big. But the headland does afford a good bit of shelter from the waves at least if not the wind.

We are passing through a marine park and they have mooring buoys in the shelter of the headland We lasso one rather than continue into the bay to anchor in potentially less-sheltered waters. A few minor amendments to our line setup and we are settled down for the night.