Tom Döhler
Sunday was a really quiet day, the only thing we did in the afternoon was swim over to see the bubbling underwater rocks, which were really strange. They made the water look like it was boiling and even under the surface we could still smell that awfully strong sulphur smell. We’re told we’ll miss it when we leave, not so sure about that to be honest!
Monday was the day when we were planning to make it through the Messina Straits! The Messina Straits is a narrow body of water in the North between Sicily and the main land of Italy. It’s known for its weird currents and busy shipping lanes. Even Homer wrote about the adventures and hardship that Odysseys and his man had to endure while sailing in these waters!
There’s a strong running current which means that if you arrive at the wrong time you won’t be able to make it through the straits. We’ read that the current would be favourable at around 14:00, which meant gettingup at the crack of the dawn to make it out of our beautiful (yet smelly) anchorage on the island of Volcano. Our early morning efforts were rewarded with a few hours of beautiful sailing over to the north end of the straits, only briefly interrupted by my investigating a rather strange vibrating noise in the aft cabin which turned out to be nothing. The internet is full of horror stories about sailing yachts getting into trouble in these waters, so we thought we’d do the responsible thing and call in our passage with Messina VTS, the station that monitors and regulates the shipping traffic. Unfortunately we arrived around lunch time, which meant Messina VTS seemingly couldn’t really be bothered to answer our radio calls, so we went into the channel without official oversight! Woohoo!
Passing through the straits themselves was actually way less eventful then we thought. We saw one of the whirlpools that people write about. They are basically large bodies of water that mix in strange ways due to a difference in salinity in the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian Sea. We’d read reports about yachts being turned 360 degrees by these whirlpools, but they didn’t seem to have any effect on us. We made it to our harbour (more like two rickety pontoons) in Reggio di Calabria, and quickly put the boat to bed to get on with our next mission: buying smartphones.
Coming off the boat we found what must be the shadiest part of Reggio – run down streets lined by blocky concrete buildings and the few pedestrians all looking rather scary. We made it into a phone shop with literally no idea what phone to buy. We knew we wanted a cheapish phone in an effort to spend less money and hopefully less time on these modern day pacifiers, but oh my god – sooo many options! Experiencing a severe attack of choice stress we decided to go and check out more stores. We found a nice big shopping street that literally had a phone shop every 20 meters or so. As we were going from shop to shop we slowly realised what we wanted, and ended up going for a Nokia 3 and Nokia 5. We thought choosing the phone was the hard part, and once we’d made a decision we could walk into the next store and just pick up a pair, but nothing is ever that easy, is it? None of the stores had the combination of phones we were looking for. Tired and exhausted we decided to recharge our batteries with a nice pizza before giving it one last go, back at the first shop we originally went in. And lo and behold – he had our phones! It took us a while to explain to him that we wanted two Nokia phones, and no – not a “Nokia 2” phone. After he realised what we were after, he told us in utter disappointment that he’d run out of Nokia 5’s, just as he opened a random drawer and oh – there one was! A brand new Nokia 5! Happy with our newly acquired toys we made our way back to the boat and turned in for an early night.
