Weather Jail in San Vito lo Capo, Sicily

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We spent two weeks waiting for a window to sail to Sardinia, then on to Mallorca. There are much worse places to be in weather jail, but even the nicest cages are still cages. Er, boats.

We started out back in Palermo, where we “had to” sight see for a few days. It was fun to be back in a city we were already a little familiar with, and Palermo was still full of surprises for us. We booked an apartment in the old city and spent our days walking, eating, and moaning after eating too much.

Galizzi wasn’t open on the weekend, and their crane needed repairs, so it was three days until Flying Fish was relaunched – and without a hitch. We had to mortgage our souls to pay for the bottom work that was done while we were yukking it up in Norway and England, but she IS beautiful. At least her bottoms are. Smooooove as a baby’s cheeks. (Unfortunately, a sprinkling of rain overnight was enough to turn the blue dust of anti-foul paint that had settled all over the boat into a sticky, staining blue paste.)

After a night in an anchorage, we returned to the shipyard the next morning to meet our rigging tuner – who was also the person who replaced the zip on our sail bag* and the windshield on our helm enclosure. Vincenzo is a sail maker by trade but also very confident tuner. Our new rigging had become well stretched out between Mytilini and Palermo, a mere thousand nautical miles or so, and all new rigging needs to be tightened up after some use. Vincenzo was the man for the jobs, and we were lucky he was able to meet us on short notice.

(*You might remember that we’d had our sail bag zip replaced fewer than 6 months ago in Mytilini. Blew out almost immediately.)

We set off for San Vito lo Capo that afternoon in a following breeze, looking at about 6 hours of sailing. There really wasn’t enough wind to put up the main – about 8-9 knots – and we immediately realized our moment had come. We were going to fly our new parasail for the first time.

The anchorage in San Vito lo Capo is a sandy extension of its long, wide, white sand beach. At least most of it is sand. It was relatively windy when we arrived, and unable to really see the bottom we assumed it was as sandy as the rest and dropped anchor a little east of the recommended anchoring zone. Given the wind conditions I pulled back on it hard once it was set – we were very sure it wasn’t going anywhere. And we were more correct about that than we knew.

A couple of days later we saw our window for Sardinia and jumped on it. Got the engines warmed up, battened down the hatches, and started bringing up the anchor. Except that the anchor wasn’t moving. At all. Peter got in with snorkel gear and found that the tip of our Mantis was firmly wedged between two rocks. FFS. We laid out a ton of chain to try to pull it sideways, but no joy. Peter tried setting up a hookah with our hose so he could dive down and work it free, but the hose closed from the water pressure before he was more than 5 feet down. He realized if he pulled himself down the chain he could reach the anchor quickly, and then have a few seconds to work on it, then promptly blew out an eardrum on his way down. I was searching for local divers when a call for Flying Fish came across the VHF – from Dove, a neighboring boat.

Turned out they had seen our floundering and recognized desperation when they saw it. And they had a dive tank and knew how to use it. He took about ten minutes down there to free the anchor, then wouldn’t accept anything more than a bottle of cold prosecco in return for saving us a couple hundred euros for a commercial diver. Sailors are nothing if not helpful in times of need!

We re-anchored in a bona fide sandy area and took another look at the weather. It was then I remembered that in addition to the wind, swell, and storm forecasts I should be looking at the CAPE index as well. Put simply, the CAPE index tells you how much energy is available in the atmosphere for likely thunderstorms. It’s an important part of deciding when to stay and when to go. Unfortunately, the CAPE index for the trip was at 3500, the highest level on the scale – and was going to stay that way for another 4 days. Anything over 1000 indicates probable storms, and our weather guru, Vandy (Awildian) confirmed that they delay departures for anything over 1500 or so. I was already freaked out about waterspouts in Sicily – the Bayesian tragedy was fresh in our minds, particularly since we had been in that anchorage only a couple of weeks before it happened. The sea was ridiculously warm, and everything pointed to “Go only if you’re desperate.” Which is never a good reason to go.

So, we stayed. And stayed. The stretch of high CAPE index came and went, followed immediately by a mistral that blew for over a week, riling the sea and making boat life utterly miserable with swell and relentless winds. We finally thought we saw another window – more of a mail slot, as Eric (Awildian) likes to call them – and we were up at 5:00 to get going. Peter checked the engines as usual, then went to the helm to fire them up, and the port engine was completely dead. To be more specific, the port battery was dead. An ex-battery. (He confirmed it was the battery by putting the starboard one in and it started right up.) We did have brand new jumper cables and though it took some doing he finally got it sparked. He ran it for a good long time, long enough to recharge it, then decided to turn it off. In the interim, we realized we were exhausted, and the weather mail slot could wait a few hours. We took a deep breath and went back to bed for a few hours.

When we woke up the port battery was dead again. FFS. San Vito is not a large town, and a quick search showed that the closest auto parts store was a 45-minute drive. On the way into town Peter had the brilliant idea of checking with the attendant at the local marina’s fuel dock to see if he had any ideas about locating a new battery without the rigamarole of a rental car. Ten minutes later a van pulled up with our choice of batteries and we were spared the time and expense of driving ourselves all over the damned island for one.

With the port engine back in the game we decided to start them up again and point west. We got about 10 minutes past the breakwater before calling it and heading back. Despite the predictions for manageable wind, wind direction, and waves there was two-meter swell on our nose and 20 knots of wind to boot. The thought of facing that for 30 hours was just too much. We weren’t desperate enough yet.

In the meantime, September was creeping by. Somehow, we managed to not go completely bonkers, I’m happy to report. White-knuckling it, yes. Frustrated, yes. Utterly tired of being on the boat, definitely. But every few days we got in the dinghy and went into town for provisioning, walking around, eating out, and having yet another gelato. So not bonkers, so far.

And just when we thought we would be wintering in San Vito lo Capo, we decided our time had finally come. We headed out early one morning and according to PredictWind and Windy we could expect much better conditions. About 30 hours later we arrived in southern Sardinia.