Our passage to Sardinia started easy and ended tough.  We debated whether to leave that morning.  Although the forecasts were good, the weather looked stormy.  Weather predictions here are so inaccurate that I have reverted to tried and true methods of looking at the sky and old sayings like “red sky in the morning, sailor take warning.”  We decided to go 10 miles, buy fuel and then decide.  After we bought our fuel, the sky was clear.  From 10:00 am to 2:00 am, we had boring ride with no wind and flat seas.  We did pick up a pair of stowaways about 30 miles off Sicily.   One little bird sat at the stern and one at the bow, both keeping a careful watch. 

At around 2:00 am, we started seeing lighting in the far distance.  The flashes grew closer and closer.  We managed to maneuver around most of the vast storm, but were smack in the middle of severe lighting at 3:00 am.   Unlike an automobile, a sail boat is a poor place to weather a thunderstorm.  The big metal stick in the middle of the ocean seems an easy target. 

I knew I should reduce sail before we reached the electrical storm.  However, I didn’t want work at the mast with lighting nearby and the wind was only 5 knots at that point; so we did not reef.  At 5:00 am, the lighting had passed and the wind hit with Sharon on watch.  It was 30 knots before I was on deck.  The boat sailed fine, but I began to lose control when the wind went over 40 knots.  Georgia J was going 10 knots- more than her theoretical hull speed.  At 46 knots, I did something we have never done before.   We did an emergency drop of part of the mainsail without properly reefing and regained control of the boat.  After the wind dropped to the 30’s, I was able to go to the mast and put a proper reef in the sail.  By then, we had been blown downwind 10 miles off of course. 

Again and again, the wind came up into the mid 30’s, but Georgia J handled it just fine with only a reefed main sail.   We were sad that our little bird stowaways disappeared in the storm, but were happy to arrive at in Sardinia at 4:00 pm, a passage of 32 hours.

s/v Georgia J, moored at Villasimius Marina, Carbonara Bay, Sardinia, Italy

PS- The little birds appeared in the cockpit just before landfall.  One was singing and one was sullen- sort of like us.

The passages have been quite challenging with a lot of ship and local traffic.  Going around the “toe“ of Italy kept us on our toes as we passed through the Straits of Messina.  Reminiscent of crossing the channel in Singapore, we had strong current and lots of traffic.  In our most recent overnight, two interesting things happened.  We were listening to VHF conversations between a “British War Ship on NATO Active Endeavor”   and the Italian Coast Guard.  Also, I was more than a little startled as a jet passed over us at 3:00 am so low that it at least looked like it was going to hit the mast (an optical illusion, I hope). 

The small towns we have visited have been rather similar.  Each one has a castle. The people have been friendly but speak almost no English. Last, but not least, they all have great pizza.  I have not been in what I would call a real supermarket since Montenegro. 

Tomorrow, we begin our last overnight passage for a while, as we head to Sardinia to meet our friends, Bill and Kayce.  We bid Sicily a fond farewell.

S/V Georgia J, moored at Castellammare, Sicily

Our passage around the heel of Italy’s boot went very well.  After several days of high winds in Brindisi, we decided to poke our head out of the harbor to see how rough the Adriatic had become. We were pleased to find that the waves were only about 4 feet high.   We had a wonderful downwind sail along the southeastern coast of Italy.  During the day, the wind increased but the waves continued to decrease.  When we rounded the heel of the boot of Italy, Georgia J was making 9.5- 10 knots on flat seas and a reefed main.  This was the best day of sailing we have had in months.

At the heel, we left the Adriatic Sea and entered the Ionian Sea.   Within 15 minutes, the wind died but we decided to continue overnight across the Gulf of Taranto, a distance of 73 miles, to the town of Crotone.    

When we travel at night, we try to identify all the lights we see in order to avoid collision.  This is done with a combination of radar, binoculars, night vision scope, and intuition.   We also have charts and publications which identify navigational lights for the entire world by location, color, and frequency.

At 3:30 am, Sharon awoke me because she could not identify some unusual lights.  When I went to the cockpit, I was shocked to see a string of brilliant flashing red lights extending across the horizon.   I slowed the boat to a crawl and reviewed our publications to see what I had missed.  Crotone has four offshore oil and gas platforms, but we were still 15 miles away from the wells.  I considered airport runway lights, but we were 18 miles from land and the string of lights clearly stretched for many miles.  I thought that perhaps an over-sea pipeline had been built to service the oil platforms.   However, my charts showed underwater pipelines and nothing appeared on radar.  We also appeared to be very close to these lights.

With no mention of similar lights in any publication and nothing showing on radar, the only logical conclusion was that this must an offshore transportation facility for extra-terrestrial abductions.  Slowly, we crept closer and closer through the dark studying the radar and scanning with binoculars.  As dawn started to break, I could tell that the lights were actually quite a bit above the horizon.   When dawn finally came, the lights were gone and no structures were visible.  We continued past the oil platforms to Crotone Harbor still wondering what we had seen.  Just before entering the harbor, I noticed a long line for windmills on a hill way above the town.  We had seen the windmills’ warning lights for airplanes from about 20 miles away.  Thank God we didn’t hit them.  Sharon remarked that she felt like Don Quixote. 

s/v Georgia J, moored at Crotone, Italy