Unfortunately, there was also a significant change in the forecast for the weather to the north of Sicily from Wednesday, with an additional Low Pressure system developing off Naples, assisted by northerly winds coming down the east coast of Sardinia and combining with the westerly winds being pushed around the northwestern tip and along the north coast of Sicily by the Low Pressure system to the south of Sicily, reducing our weather window to sail overnight all the way to the Naples area, specifically to Sant’ Angelo on Ischia Island. In other words, it’s yet another cluster of monumental proportions, which changes by the day. Not one forecast is accurate for more than 24 hours and even then it changes. So frustrating!
This, of course, resulted in a change to our revised plan one day into it, assuming the conditions materialise, but hopefully we can still continue moving in a northwesterly direction in order to get to Sardinia at some point in the not too distant future.
It’s fair to say, all of this would not necessarily be a showstopper if there were a selection of decent, well protected anchorages for these constantly varying conditions, but there aren’t and getting a reservation in a marina, is difficult too, especially for a rather beany catamaran like Paw Paw; either they don’t have space or they don’t respond to any written communications, assuming, of course, that you can actually find their contact details to request a reservation.
After breakfast, however, the first matter of today was to rectify a few issues that had cropped up on Paw Paw yesterday. Firstly Roy discovered that the bottom shelf of the port forward cabin was wet and had dampened his clothes, in particular, one of his swimsuits and a rushguard, which was only noticed because he had to jump in the water yesterday evening to clean our depth sensor and check for blockages in all our throughhulls, particularly the watermaker throughhull, since that had suddenly stopped producing water en route.
So, while Roy hunted for the leak, Elaine emptied out his cupboard to dry his damp clothes. Fortunately it didn’t take long to find the leak on the accumulator o-ring of the freshwater pump. Once that was fixed, when checking the watermaker, he discovered that the saltwater lift pump was full of air. We’ll know tomorrow if clearing that resolved the issue.
Afterwords we dinghied ashore to Taormina Beach, the latter word used rather loosely and to be honest, one would have to be desperate to want to lie on it; it was nothing but pebbles and rocks and only freezing water to swim in.
The next hurdle was getting to the road, to walk to the little town of Villagonia, to stretch our legs and to enjoy a coffee and a baked delight. This proved to be something of a maze as we negotiated tunnels, steps and a very busy road without any pavements or sidewalks, requiring us to press ourselves up against the closest building every time a vehicle passed and we weren’t the only people having to do this; their were numerous pedestrians having to take their lives in their hands along this road without an alternative route, including all the folks arriving by rail at the historic railway station and tourists pulling suitcases down the road looking for their hotel.
By the time we reached the “supermarket” and scratched our way through the pitiful fresh produce supply, we were both missing the fabulous fresh produce markets in Samoa, Fiji, Vanuatu , New Caledonia and Türkiye, as well as the fabulous grocery stores and healthy foods of New Zealand, Australia and SE Asia. Throughout our circumnavigation, up until we reached Türkiye, the fruit and vegetables we purchased tasted like the fruit and vegetables that they were, not some tasteless, bitter mockup.
On our return walk, we stopped for lunch at Puerto Rico Beach Club and had the most expensive mouthful of salad yet; Elaine’s literally had two very thin slices of tomato on a bed of iceberg lettuce and a blob of mozzarella cheese on the side with about 6 olives for €16. Roy’s wasn’t much better, but had very rubbery octopus added for €18. What a rip off! We had a beautiful view, though, overlooking the bay where Paw Paw was anchored. Trying to remain grateful for our cruising lifestyle, we had to remind ourselves that many people would love to be sitting in that very expensive restaurant with the view we had, overlooking their yacht.
However, if it sounds like we’re not enjoying sailing in the Mediterranean, you would be right. That would be for a host of reasons, but primarily because we’re not actually sailing; we’re motoring. We are, however, enjoying the touring aspects and the fabulous attractions we’ve stumbled upon thus far en route, by sheer chance actually, because we didn’t plan our route to tour, but rather to get west to Gibraltar the quickest possible way, with a minimum number of overnight sails, taking into consideration the prevailing weather conditions in the months we would be sailing through these countries.
All in all our experience in the Mediterranean has thus far been a case of “we’ve had the best, now try the rest” and it just isn’t coming up to snuff at all. Let’s hope it improves!
