Messina to Roccella Ionica

At 7:30 we sparked up the Yanmar and left Marina Nettuna di Messina, turned into the channel and promptly set a new speed record – 11.7 Knots – under power in our ‘mid-cruise’ RPM position.

We reckon that we had a 4 knot push from behind. I had a temptation to raise the sails for a minute to claim a pretty big number for the new speed record – but then decided that we should just take advantage of this positive current – as current has a tendency to even itself out over time. After about an hour of powering we pulled out the sails and continued to sail at 9+ knots (GPS) for the next two hours until we rounded the bottom of the boot of Italy … then the wind promptly quit. Rolling up the sails to become a powerboat takes about a minute on Tara so we continued along the coast of Italy for the next hour or two. 

Views along the south Italian coast...cool highway!

Two boats going the other way had their mainsails reefed to the second reef-point (reefing is the term used to describe reducing sail area – which is a good thing to do when it’s really windy) hmmm … wonder why. About 10 minutes later we experienced a 20 knot wind from the east that let us sail close-hauled all the way to Roccella Ionica. 

Games behind the boat before the wind hit. 

This is why we were swimming...
the bottom number is water temp.

An then...some great wind! 

We sailed the last 30 miles chuffing along with main and jib. Everyone took a turn driving – the kids are actually able to sail, they just pretend that they cannot. When we are sailing close winded the Autopilot is pretty slow – I can regularly get 1.5 knots more boatspeed out of the boat in those conditions than Otto can so we try to hand-steer as much as possible.

Our first dolphin sighting! Yay!

Getting into Roccella Ionica provides a bit of a pucker factor. You need to start 200 meters from the breakwater and go perpendicular to the entrance, turn hard right onto the inside line of the opening – avoiding the silting up right side of the entrance. There’s a 50 meter wide a 20 meter high pile of sand they’ve dredged up from the entrance just off to the side, so you know it silts up regularly. Marina was calling out the depths as I was going as slow as the boat would go in gear – 1.0, 0.9, 0.8, 0.4 meters under the keel. Getting 20,000 pounds off the bottom is not easy – but after the 0.4 the readings started getting deeper and we made it no problem. Inside we found a nice marina with lots of dockspace, plenty of help and only 20 Euros a night.

At the dock in Roccella Ionica

A fellow in a US-registered boat came by to say hi. Al is from Bodrum Turkey sailing around the Med with his wife Esin and their new Beneteau Oceanis 46. They’ve been out since May and are making their way back to Turkey. We had a lovely time on the back of Tara talking about where we’ve been and places we’d like to see.

The pizza and the service was amazing!

On shore there is the biggest pizza restaurant we have ever seen – I tried to count the tables but a rough guess would be 1500 seats. Our waiter was an Australian guy whose parents emigrated from Italy to Australia and then decided to come back a few years ago. They have an wi-fi based ordering system. We ordered our drinks and a plate of chips and swordfish carpaccio as an appetizer and – no lie – they arrived in about 1 minute. You order pizza by the meter and you can mix and match the flavours – so we had Salccica, Quatro Stagione, and, for Ross: Margarita (a plain cheese pizza – go figure). At the end of the evening we decided to order another meter of pizza so we would have lunch the next day.
Jessie wanted to get back to Skype and we sent her and Ross back to the boat. Marina and I were shocked that Ross came back after depositing his sister safely on the boat. By this time I was getting so tired that I went back to join Jess on the boat – but in reality I wanted to hug my pillow more. Marina and Ross chatted in the restaurant, waiting for the extra pizza we wanted to take with us on the road the next morning.