35:29.947 N
012:36.321 E
27/07/10
09:00
We haven’t quite left yet. Having looked more closely into it I
have decided to go to Lampedusa, which is a sensible 162 mile run and looks to
have a nice small town and more important a protected harbour we can anchor
in. By comparison Pantelleria is
really small and an awkward distance, too far to day hop and not far enough to
justify an overnighter.
Last night we walked up about a million steps to the old
town overlooking the harbour. It
was pretty touristy so with having a really good look around we jumped in a Taxi
and went to the larger town of Marsa
which my ten year old pilot recommended.
It was a town full of locals with no obvious tourism as such and no real
restaurants, We had a seriously
undistinguished meal is the town centre, eating near to the main highlight, a
pet camel, munching away in the middle of a small square cafe area. Demetri had a few Dinars left, and as
you can’t exchange them anywhere we went back the the old town to buy a souvenir
and had a much better look around and if course found several restaurants
overlooking the harbour with great views and I’m certain much better food than
we had in Marsa. They also served
wine and beer which was conspicuously absent in Marsa, which is fair enough as
of course their culture precludes alcohol.
Anyway apart from being amused by the camel I regretted not staying in
the old town. A lot of it looked
remarkably like
Greece.
11:00
We escaped at 11:00 which caused a bit of confusion as we hadn’t realized
the local time was one hour earlier then we thought. Shortly after checking in yesterday a
Customs man followed me back to the boat.
I asked him what he needed and he said he just wanted to see us. What he actually wanted was a bottle of
Whisky. Steve told him the only Whisky on board was a special gift for my wife
and in the end I fobbed him off
with a bottle of Pimm’s No 1 (sorry Graham). This morning after I finished clearing
out, the Chief and his number one came with me to the boat and I thought we were
going to have a repeat of the entry fiasco, but they didn’t care about examining
our manifest which listed every bit of electronics, computers and cameras etc on
the boat. The did want to be
sure we weren’t smuggling out any locals—fair enough – but what they really
wanted was a “gift.” They didn’t
want booze and in the end I parted with a 10 pound note after the chief
suggested “jokingly” that 20 Euros per person would be appropriate. He first wanted to know how much local
currency we had left as he obviously had his greedy eyes on that and was
disappointed when I told him we’d gone to a lot of trouble to spend whatever we
had as we knew we couldn’t export it. His sidekick was very happy with the 10
quid and we left the dock almost before they got off the boat.
16:00
Had a wonderful sail the first four hours forereaching at 8-9 knots in blue water
covered by bluer sky. We’ve just
put the pole up and the speed in down but it’s still extremely pleasant. I don’t think it gets any better than
this. We’ve got 10 miles or so to
go before we need to gybe, maybe it will be spinnaker time.
22:00
In the end we didn’t gybe as we could more or less make
course slowly and the wind was diminishing..
Well we had a really really nice sail but the wind
plummeted from 17 to 7 knots from
dead behind which alas is of little use for us. The forecast suggests it will
stay that way for the rest of the night so reluctantly I have just turned in the
other means of propulsion.
It could be that the wonderful wind we’ve has the last
few days has finished for now and we will be doing a lot of motoring over the
next 703 miles between here and Spetses. Ugh!
28/07/10
06:00
Quiet night motoring. Steve had to dodge a few fishing boats
on his watch. This morning’s dawn was remarkably similar to last night‘s sunset
which in my experience is extremely rare.
10:00
I dropped anchor at
8:45 in the outer harbour. It turned out we were in some sort of
military manoeuvre area (???) but the boat that came to tell us that said we
could go to the town quay which we did.
It was all done with sign language as they of course only spoke
Italian. No services but it’s free.
This was a result as the guide book
says there are only 10 berths max length 10 metres, There are no authorities,
it’s every boat for itself. I like this place. Already.
We will probably leave for
Matla (98 miles) tomorrow night.