Porto Palo

13^thJuly - Lipari – Stromboli (on a buoy)

14^thJuly - Stromboli – Naxos (in port)

15^thJuly - Naxos (in port)

16^thJuly - Naxos – Catania (in port)

17^thJuly - Catania (in port)

18^thJuly - Catania – Syracusa (anchored)

19^thJuly - Syracusa (anchored)

20^thJuly - Syracusa (anchored)

21^stJuly - Syracusa – Catania (in port)

22^ndJuly - Catania – Porto Palo (anchored)

Now with photos!

Thursday 19^thJuly - Syracusa

Somehow, I seem to have managed not to have a good time in the Eolien Islands when the conditions were ideal for doing just that.

It started well enough with Vulcano but afterwards, for some reason, I decided on a terribly complicated plan for going to Stromboli which involved spending three days in Lipari while I checked out the buoy hiring situation and the climbing situation etc...

In the end what happened was that I spent three not particularly fun and rather expensive days in Lipari and found out sod all about hiring buoys or climbing the mountain, the latter largely due to my horror of going into any shop or agency which advertised “Climb Stromboli by night!”. A self defeating set of criteria.

So I ended up just going to Stromboli without having booked anything. I took a buoy which cost me 40 euros but which included a free taxi service to and from the buoy (well free for one trip there and back before nine at night).

Approaching Stromboli. The Scaria del Fuoco.

I called up the taxi service around half past five and they came promptly and I set off to climb Stromboli unguided (Why, you ask? The reasons are lost in the mists of my confused mind but it was all to do with climbing the mountain, seeing the crater and then setting off while it was still dark and seeing the Scaria del Fuoco by night, all on my own bat). I set off from just behind the church on the main square following the signs which said Scaria del Fuoco. The track ambles round the mountain sometimes climbing sometimes losing height for a depressingly long time. When it gets to the edge of the Scaria del Fuoco which is the great smouldering ash slope on the north western side of the mountain, it begins to climb seriously in short zig-zags and steep scrambles.

Stromboli: going up.

And, ladies and gentlemen, I piked. It was not just that the mountain was making these noises like, well, like you would expect a volcano to make, a sort of breathy roar every ten minutes or so and getting close. Every time it did this I would half cover my head and wish I had my LATecis hard hat. Just one tiddly cinder ejected at 300 km/hr straight up. The path was covered in rocks much bigger than tiddly cinders which must have been chucked out by the volcano at some stage. It was getting cloudy and the light was going and the route was a little exposed; nothing special, just bare rough red rock, something you would hate to come down at night. Due to my total lack of preparation, I didn't have the slightest idea how far I had to go, not even a give-away advertisement with a two centimetre plan of the island. I have the feeling that I was within about fifty vertical metres of the top but you know how it is; what you think is the top is often only the first of a series of false summits. And I had seen no-one, not a cat (well I saw a cat but that was earlier) and for some reason, my Blackberry had frozen when I tried to take a picture of the Scaria del Fuoco so I didn't know what time it was.

So I piked. On the way back I did meet four or five people and regretted having turned back as they looked as well prepared as I was. The guided ascents must take a different route as I didn't meet any of the alleged hundreds of people who climb it very day.

Piking ; Stromboli lets off a roar of laughter.

Back on the boat, I re-considered leaving before it was light. It was a very dark night and there were lots of buoys everywhere and lots of boats everywhere and I didn't have a good light. And I was somewhat tired; my month-and-a-half-on-a-boat-without-moving legs were wobbly and I was very tired and hot and sweaty.

At about midnight, one of the boats left obviously to go and see the sights, but he had a big powerful torch and a crew. Earlier, I had been awakened by the characteristic sound of the very nice Ovni which had decided to anchor beside me (as taking a buoy was against his principles) trying to lift his anchor, no doubt to go off to see the Scaria too. His anchor had probably caught one of the ground chains of the buoys as he could get his chain in only so far then the winch would stall. I think he ended up blowing a fuse. He was still there when I left in the morning. A job for a diver probably.

During the night, the wind turned so that it was exactly 180° to the swell. This meant that my boat turned and presented its rear to the chop. Bavaria 32s slam like nothing else in these conditions. I didn't get any more sleep from that point on. Additionally, the boat rode over the mooring and spent several hours scraping back and forth over it rubbing off large quantities of anti-fouling in the process.

At 04h30, I gave up. It was light enough to see to drop the buoy and leave so I left, direction Straits of Messina.

To correct the nonsense I said in the previous blog :

The same company which hired me the buoy; Sabbianera can organise the trek up the mountain and hire out gear if necessary. Their shop is just on the left as you come off the pier. There is a big banner and another slightly smaller banner saying they hire buoys which for some reason I had managed to miss completely. There is a bar attached to the shop which is the cool place for young Strombolites to hang out in the evening.

The mountain was not closed on the day I went as I saw the headlights of people descending from the top around midnight. I met a guy on the taxi going back to the boat who had done it a couple of years before and he said it was definitely worth the trip. The casual way he talked about it made me realise it was a thing every tourist did when they came to Stromboli and not the drama it had become in my mind.

So, in all, I managed to screw up my visit to the Eoliens. Maybe I'll come back one day. If I do, I will definitely take the guided tour and no nonsense. And if I visit any more live volcanoes, I am going to take the guided tour too. They are scary things.

I had to motor to the Straits. Practically no wind and nearly a metre of swell; a typical Thyrrenian SEA day. I had forgotten in my Eolien brain wash state to see what the tide situation in the straits was. Luckily it was just slack water when I arrived. Even so, the current running north was about two knots at the strongest. I think I sailed through what is left of Charybdis; a patch of spiky water, like the waves had used hair gel. The straights are slightly unsettling with patches of oily smooth water and patches of rough water but the most dangerous thing on this day anyway were the swordfish boats. These weird looking things motor up and down the straight and they don't look where they are going.

The Straits of Messina. All that I could find of Charybdis.

Straits of Messina. Swordfish boat. Much more dangerous than Homeric monsters in my book.

I didn't like the look of the marina at Messina so I decided to go straight on to Naxos. A nice wind had come up so I put up the sails. The wind which luckily was blowing down the Strait became so nice, I ended up having to take in two reefs in the main. Just before I got to Taormina it slackened off and I ended up motoring in with the familiar Mediterranean conditions of a metre following sea and 2 knots of wind.

The little marina at Naxos is not good. It consists of four pontoons sticking out from the root of the sea wall. The map showed shallow water and the guide talks about the presence of a wreck just beside the pier for goodness sake so I was being careful, but the first thing that happened when I tried to come into the spot on the pontoon the guy was waving from was I ran aground. I backed off and following his waving tried a different route and ran aground again. I was on the point of giving it up when the guy on the boat in the next spot showed me how to get in by hugging the end of the next pontoon out and coming in as close to his boat as possible. I moored in 3m of water but the water just one boat width away on the outer edge of the pontoon was only 1,5 metres deep.

Naxos. Yet another volcano.

The guy in the boat next to me turned out to be Hungarian. He has apparently been cruising the Mediterranean for several years. He was there with his wife who spoke Hungarian, French, German and English and their daughter and her boyfriend/husband, I didn't catch. Very nice people. They were sightseeing Taormina (or rather the daughter and boyfriend were, I got the impression he had been there and done that in spades) before heading up the coast of Croatia. Did you know there is a Beograd in Croatia too?

Taormina by night

Taormina; a long distance view of Westward. (Hint; she is moored beside another Bavaria)

On the second night, it blew 35 knots from the north west straight across the harbour and side on to the moored boats. My boat which was on the outer end was being bounced around in a most uncomfortable way. I had to close the windows as the spray from the chop breaking against the side of the boat was coming in. The boat was leaning over at about thirty degrees in the gusts. It was never dangerous but it was certainly not re-assuring. When Andreas (I learnt his name later) left at six in the morning the wind had gone down to about ten to fifteen knots and I followed suite. I was aided not at all by two wee drunk men who I think worked for the ormeggiatori. One of them kept wanting to know why my friend had not just gone straight out, like that, why had he messed around so much? and the other kept saying “My friend, My friend” and prodding ineffectually at the mooring lines.

There was lots of wind for what was meant to be the trip down to Syracusa too. It was supposed to be force six (Which I think it was though the wind speed indicator insisted it never went over 22 knots. The wind speed indicator has the tendency to underestimate the wind speed downwind (even though it has a gizmo for calculating true speed) then changing its mind when you harden up. The log stopped working completely on the real trip to Syracusa so maybe the problem is associated with it.

In any case, I ended up with two reefs in the main again and the genoa half rolled up. At about ten miles from Syracusa, I decided I should read the Sailing Instructions for the entry. Hey, it says here that with a strong north easterly wind, the currents coming out of the bay at Syracusa make it difficult for small vessels. Now the Sailing Instructions idea of a small vessel is about the size of a Channel ferry. The Sailing Instructions idea of a good mooring is 100 metres depth with a rock bottom. So I decided not to go to Syracusa and made a screeching turn back to Catania which was luckily still achievable in one straight board.

I liked Catania. The marina is well sheltered and there is none of this nonsense of bouncing around every time a boat goes out. The staff are friendly and it is a reasonable price. 35 euros a night for my boat. The place is quite animated too, not one of those cemetery quiet yacht parking lots I'd seen. Despite being a week day there were people around the clubhouse most of the day and lots of people doing work on their boats. The marina is in the commercial port so there is a certain amount of commercial shipping too and big lorries roaring past but this wasn't a nuisance.

Catania; the low rent end of Etna

I liked Catania town. The central square has a famous fountain with a sculpture of an elephant with a fixed stare and a big sloppy grin. It is pretty grimy, particularly near the docks. There is nothing older than 17^thcentury due to it being knocked down by first an eruption of Etna and then an earthquake. The buildings though have that Italian, “this building could be a hundred or a thousand years old and nobody cares particularly” look. The university has the coolest law faculty building of any university I have seen. The streets around it are full of really interesting looking bars and wee restaurants. The fish market is half in and half out of a bunch of buildings very near the main square and is rather claustrophobic and entirely full of fish of all descriptions. And vegetables too. Bellini is buried under a stone slab in the Duomo where he was apparently moved from Pere Lachaise.

Catania; Bellini's tomb.

Two American boats were moored just across from me in the marina. Horizons, a recentish forty footish ketch and Rob Roy a nice old wooden ketch about the same length with wooden masts and spars. The owners Vince and Dave brought them over in 2004 and 2005 respectively and they have been cruising summers in Europe ever since. They are both retired now (I think both) and they are still cruising. The boats winter in Sardinia though I think the owners go back to the US. It was Vince who told me Andreas' name funnily enough.

Catania. The very cool law faculty

I ambled down from Catania to Syracuse sometimes sailing sometimes motoring with a wind which Meteoconsult said was a force 4 nor-easter but which looked to me more like a variable to force three east south-easter. There was a medium sized oil tanker on the shore just in the northern suburbs of Syracuse. It was right out of the water on a low cliff. The spray must have been blowing in the windows of the apartment buildings on that night. It just shows what conditions here can be like.

In the northern suburns of Syracuse. A reminder that it is not always sun and light winds.

Thursday 20^thJuly – Syracuse

I've decided to go back to Catania to fetch Olivier rather than wait for him in Porto Palo. Joining at Porto Palo doesn't gain us any time as he can't get a bus till the next day and I have no great desire to see Porto Palo. So I'll stay in Syracuse one more night and head back there tomorrow.

I'm not sure whether I think Syracuse is great or a bit of a bore. The harbour is an amazing natural port and a good place to anchor. As long as one looks east rather than west, the views are great. I could probably stay anchored here for a week. I did my duty by the sights and went to see the Greek theatre which is touted by the Lonely Planet as being one of the highlights of a visit to Sicily. Unfortunately, it was half covered with clapboard and entirely covered with workers stripping off the clapboard and dis-assembling the two rotating stage mechanisms which cover the real stage. Apparently it is still used as a theatre but to do this, they cover all the original Greek stone seating with clapboard seating and all the original stairs with wooden stairs. This seems to partially, if not entirely defeat the purpose of using the Greek theatre in the first place. It's not as if it's got a fantastic view like the one at Taormina. Dyonisos's ear is just a feature left over from the quarrying which is a bit like the caves at the top of Buttes Chaumont in Paris (but without the overwhelming smell of piss) and which may have been modelled on it or may be like that for the same reason i.e. it's an ex-quarry too. The Roman circus is not as circussy as the Coliseum or Arles.

I met an English couple while waiting for the bus who sold their holiday home in Tuscany after owning it for 23 years and now spend every summer visiting Italy. Apparently it was the Italian bureaucracy which wore them down in the end.

The old town on the peninsula, Ortygia is ummm... lovely. I mean it's amazing and all that with miles of narrow streets with pictureskew houses and some really interesting looking little restaurants (some with amazingly high prices). It's all a bit antiseptic and clean. It must make good postcards with the pale stone and the blue sky and the blue sea on all sides but I was left a bit unmoved.

Syracuse. The view from the anchorage.

The highlight for me of the visit to Ortygia was the Duomo which was built directly over a Greek temple without taking down the Greek temple first. The columns of the Greek temple are still visible in the outer walls of the church, looking massive and a bit extra-terrestrial and much more impressive than the Norman stonework of the church. The Norman church has been added on to at various stages with baroque and 19^thcentury chapels and a hideous Baroque facade which doesn't come off at all.

On my way in to the town this morning in the annexe, I stopped and spoke to a young French guy who I saw in Catania. He is doing a tour of the Med in a 23 or 24 foot boat on a shoestring budget. He was going back to Catania today stopping only a couple of hours to pick a friend up before heading straight off for Greece this evening.

Tuesday 25^thJuly – Grand Harbour Valetta

I went back to Catania to pick up Olivier motoring the whole way and moored in the yacht harbour nearly in the same spot.

We left for Porto Palo the next morning motoring with a 6 knot head wind. Clouds started to appear. Clouds! I hadn't seen any of them since the trip from Port Man to Corsica. Just before the point, the wind freshened to around 20 knots. A bit of swell got up but we rounded the cape without problems in a hazy greyish evening light which made it difficult to see the port (particularly since I had forgotten I still had my sunglasses on). Porto Palo is a bit of a desert; a biggish open harbour with lots of fishing boats on buoys on the eastern side and a few sailing boats moored at the western end in the lee of a lowish concrete breakwater which protects you from the waves but doesn't stop any wind at all. The south coast of Sicily here is low with no hills or mountains at all.

We left for Malta the next morning but I'll put that in my next blog.