Camilla Ransom
On Saturday morning we set off towards our last anchorage of the season, Portopalo, which is on the very south east corner of Sicily. As we left the confines of Syracuse we motored into a pretty hefty swell which soon died down as we rounded and turned south. We were closely followed by a catamaran who soon overtook us and headed out into open water. Since there wasn’t much wind we decided to hug the coastline and stick to the 20m contour. Try as we might we hadn’t been able to revive our chartplotter which died during the storm so we were reliant on charts and iSailor on our iPad. This meant we also had to keep a careful eye on our position so we made sure to take an hourly log of our position. It’s something the RYA tells you always to do, but over time laziness creeps in and you become over-reliant on your electronics. We were quite glad to have had this as a bit of a reality check!
Not having a functioning chartplotter meant we also didn’t have instant visibility of our time-to-go or our ETA, and we noticed a funny thing. Rather than (obsessively) monitoring how much time we had left of our journey (well, more accurately, how long until we could have a glass of wine!) we simply relaxed and just enjoyed being on the water. We’re going to use the plotter more sparingly next season.
After a few hours we arrived in Portopalo and we surprised to see the catamaran from earlier in the day – they must have been going like the clappers! The bay itself is rather ordinary, and we could see why most people use it only as a stop-over. Behind the east breakwater were about 50 fishing boats of all ages, shapes and sizes, either on moorings of docked along the quay. We dropped anchor but after a few hours we moved as the wind had come around and positioned us a little too close to a mooring. Although it was only currently home to a small dinghy, it looked as though its full time occupant could easily be twice the size of Bini and we didn’t fancy being woken in the middle of the night by its skipper.
It was a windy night but we were head on to the waves which made the boat relatively stable. Tom had a sound night but I couldn’t sleep so lay awake listening to the waves bumping against the hull, for the last time this season.
