Week 5 - Le Castella to Palermo
What would today bring we wondered as MacMac left Le Castella behind us to cross the The Gulf of Squillace, the body of water and an inlet of the Ionian Sea along the Calabrian coast of Italy. The gulf is part of the Ionian Sea and makes up part of the east coast of the region of Calabria. It takes its present-day name from the coastal town of Squillace. Mark had talked about this stretch of the coast from the moment we bought MacMac in October, highlighting that this was a notoriously dangerous 40 miles of water.
There is no natural port throughout its whole extent, and into the 19th century, it still bore an evil reputation for for fierce sudden winds of 50 plus knots AND shipwrecks.
We had always planned to cross it in daylight and only when the wind wasn’t coming from the North West. Todays forecast was ideal and the conditions looked perfect.
It wasn’t long before we were bombing along at 8 plus knots, but unfortunately or maybe fortunately the wind eased and it was back to motor sailing. We did get a lovely spell of “goose wing” sailing, before the wind dropped to 2-3 knots for the final 10 miles.
Passing the southern headland of the gulf, we high fived each other, relieved that we had crossed without incident and Mr Yanmar had performed flawlessly.
Next up was the Straits of Messina. We had a couple of “bolt hole” options planned if the weather turned against us on the next leg. As we approached Rochelle Ionica we had a discussion and decided to press on and everything still looked favourable. Our next available Marina was Reggio Calabria, about 2/3rds into the Straits of Messina and all looked good to shoot for that. With the light fading and the sun setting we rounded the southern tip of Italy and into the strait. Still very little wind, so we were quite upbeat. We knew we had to be clear of the north end of the strait by 0230 next day to take advantage of the tide running north. This was all according to a downloaded app “Messina 2023” which had been recommended to us by a delivery crew we had met in Brindisi, thus our confidence was high that our timing, speed and target was good.
The wind speed changed from just a few knots to 22 knots on the nose. Being in the restive shelter of the straits, the seas were not too big, but we opened up the throttle a little to get some more speed and punch into it. No problem at all, we were comfortable and were starting rot pick up more shipping traffic, funnelling in both direction through the Strait.
We can’t quite recall, buy who or when, but all of a sudden we were only doing 5knots speed over the ground (SOG) according to our sat nav, but our boat speed through the water was showing 6 knots!!!
That can’t be right?
What it indicated to us that the tide was pushing us south and slowing up our actual speed over the ground by over 2 knots. For those of you non-sailors. It is like running on a treadmill. You can run at 4mph and not move an inch. The water was our treadmill and we were fighting against it to move forward.
The tide was running against it NOT with us as the tidal app had indicated to us.
Mark had been given a website for Messina by a fellow sailor called Nico whilst we were in Brindisi www.correntidellostretto.it and it was telling us a completely different story! Mark and I compared each others info and we concurred that there actually would be a short 2 hour window when both sets of info would give us a northerly flow through the narrow channel at the top between Italy and Sicily. However “once again” we were going to have to slow our speed down to about 3 1/12 - 4 knots to enter the tidal gate at the correct time. I couldn’t believe it - incredulous actually. Not that I doubted what we had to do, but more that there was as app out there that had screwed uo our day/night with incorrect data.
The “fun” part of slowing down though, was that we would have more ferries to dodge and avoid as they steamed constantly from east to west and west to east across the three miles stretch of water separating the two regions of Italy. Now let me clarify. These ferries were BIG. Big roll on roll off two deck level car ferries.
Even though we could see them on our chart plotter, we couldn’t see them 1/2 mile from us using binoculars or unaided eyesight. They were big enough to blend into the lights on either shore. They had to get very close before we could really make them out properly.
Ferries have right of way in the Strait and we were restricted in our manoeuvrability, by the TSS. The Traffic Separation Scheme is literally a virtual road on the chart. We had to keep right as we travelled north and stay in that lane.
It was an interesting and testing few hours I can tell you.
Once cleared of the TSS, we headed west toward Palermo. At last, we were on the north coast of Sicily. It was 0230 and I was absolutely wrecked. I said to Mark that I really needed to crash for an hour and crash I did. Full heavy weather gear on, life jacket and boots I just fell on top of my bunk and was asleep in seconds. My alarm went off an hour later and I staggered back up on deck to relieve Mark.
At 0400, Mark was still f**cking about with the sails and “fettling”. It was at this point I just said, “Mark just go to your bunk now, you are dead on your feet and getting close to useless”. I think he was grateful to be told and duly disappeared below. The couple of hours crawled by as I struggled to focus myself. I tried to keep busy with checking position, looking for traffic and willing the early dawn light to appear. MacMac powered on without any issue and when Mark reappeared on deck, I briefly considered waiting for sunrise, but inwardly thought, feck it, there will be another one tomorrow. This time I stripped the gear off and dove into my bunk for a dead to the world couple of hours. Bliss!
I woke up, feeling surprisingly refreshed. I put the kettle on and brought up two coffees in our Ocean Brew hot drinks containers (I can recommend these very highly) and was greeted by the sight of us under full sail, with a steaming Mount Etna volcano to port, covered in snow and the Aeolian Islands to starboard, with smoke powering from Mount Stromboli, another of the four active volcanoes in Italy. Magnificent - what a view to start the day.
As I took the deck, Mark went down below to the galley and produced a feat of a breakfast. Scrambled eggs, with a side of white beans in tomato, with pancetta, garlic and a kick of chilli. With that being scoffed down, all the tiredness, struggles and stresses of the previous 24 hours disappeared into the Italian clouds with a puff and life was wonderful once again.
After a quick chat with Zatara, who suggested stopping in Sant Agata Di Militello for shopping etc. our preference we suggested pushing on and getting into Palermo shortly after 2000 as it was such a beautiful day. Mark organised a berth for Zatara and got us a spot overnight in the fuel berth. That meant we could fill up first thing inn the morning and move to another mooring.
The sunset was glorious as we closed to within the final 10 miles from Palermo.
The TSS meant we could not make a direct approach and I navigated us along the “road” into the port, before a left had 180 turn to bring us alongside the fuel berth one the old town quay.
233 nautical miles completed since Le Castella and AT LAST we were just over half way with 602miles completed since Trogir. It felt good!
Now to watch the forecast and hope for a decent weather window which would take us to Sardinia - once again we were in the lap of the gods!