Wednesday, August 22, 2012

mare ionio

now here we are! our first 2day2nighter...we've done it!

and i tell you what: it was great!!!! and in some respects easier then just over one night -  maybe because we settled in better, knowing it would be longer, maybe because we expected to be even more tired than the last times but actually got to sleep a bit more...?

maloo, mark and i started just before 4.00pm local time in lefkas to get through the lefkas-bridge, which only opens every full hour to let boats through.
the morning i had spent making a lasagne, as we were not sure which sea to expect - but our little experience taught us, that a good feed at night is essential to get through it. mark got the boat ready and kept on updating our weather files and as planned we lifted anchor and off we went.

the first hour we had to motor, since we had the wind right on the nose (we kind of expected this, as the island of lefkas is quite hilly especially on it´s west side)

once we were clear from lefkas, we had perfect wind from n - nnw sometimes wnw....and it stayed like that for almost the whole night - only once we had to start the engine for about 1hour, but otherwise we did mostly 7kn to 7.5kn. (i am still surprised how fast our barge can be)
a good thing i had prepared that dinner, because we had little but short and steep waves, and maloo was leaning on quite an angle. (i have to say, i was quite pleased with my veggie-lasagne with pumpkin, zucchini and melanzani - turned out really well!)

from 9.00pm onwards we started our shift-scheme which had me doing the first 3h on watch, then mark for 3h and so on.
we kept this scheme up also during the day until we arrived 45h later in messina.

the first night was beautiful sailing, going through sea-glow(!!!) and hardly any shipping traffic to dodge.

'till today i was always raving about the night-sky in the southern hemisphere having more stars then the northern one....well, i must have thought that, because it was only in australia i was surrounded by complete "nothingness" and therefore darkness. being on the boat with a perfectly clear sky i have to say, i probably never seen as many stars in the sky as the last couple of nights and up north we have a very pretty night sky too!

the next morning we were surrounded by nothing but blue and calm sea - no land to be seen even on the chart (only if you zoomed out of course)...unfortunately the wind also left us, so we had to put up the iron-sail for very long and becalmed 20h. we tried the gennaker, but there was even too little wind for this big sail.

the day just flew past using the chance for a good nap if we were off watch, and a good read if we were on watch.
we had a nice shower, cooked some yummy dinner and just enjoyed our time at sea - ending the day as one should: with a glass of very good white wine (me) and an ice cold beer (mark)
the second night arrived as calm as the day before had been and everything was quite relaxed until we got close to land in the early morning hours.
something special was to pass the royal clipper (the biggest sailing ship in the world!!!) - it would have been even nicer, if there wouldn´t have been approximately 20 tiny fishing boats , some with navigation lights (these are the easy ones) but a lot of them without navigation lights (and these ones have you sweating blood and guts) surrounding us.
quite an "interesting feeling" that is, when you all of a sudden hear an outboarder next to you in the absolute darkness (i had this feeling that there was something there, but was unpleasantly surprised to see my feeling was right!)
they are so little, that most of them are not even picked up by the radar.
at some point i was just hoping they´d see me early enough and get out of my way. with the binoculars almost constanly scanning the waters around me and the radar zoomed in to 1nm of scan around maloo, everything went well and at least kept me awake until the sun was up and day light made even the tiniest tinny visible.

the straight of messina welcomed us with 20-25kn of wind on the nose, but fortunately a current from behind. we put up some sail again and shot across to the other side, however with all the shipping traffic we we're forced to motor the last hour up the coast of sicily and as planned, we safely tied up in messina marina at around 1.30pm. we had a little stroll along the main road to the ferry port, paid way too much for this berth - mark is currently washing the salt-crust off the boat and tonight we will celebrate having a real sicilian pizza and a glass of wine. tomorrow we will head up the 40nm to volcano and start to conquer the liparian islands.

in total we did 264,38nm - cool, hey!?


leaving lefkada

morning hours approaching calabria

navigation hazards

messina


crazy fishing boat (yes, there there are people up the top and at the front!)

on watch




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