We got up at first light to leave Greece so we would get to Sicily in daylight three days later. The beginning of the trip was pretty calm, we had the gennaker up and Ali went to bed but when the speedo was reading under three miles an hour I packed it away and put the engine on. It was windless but it wasn't calm, there was a swell running up from the south which was weird as that stayed with us for the rest of the trip even when the wind built up from the - On the nose direction! After perusing all the forecasts we could get they were all wrong and we were soon banging into a F6 sometimes 7 as close as we could sail into it! Typical.
We weren't the only creatures in the area affected by the winds though....
As we got further from Greece and it got windier we started to get little passengers! The poor little birds were just knackered and must have been delighted to find a resting place for a while.
Another one, not sure what these brownish ones are but we had a few.
This little dude sat huddled in the dinghy for a few hours and we tried to feed it bread but it was petrified. Kaylee was very upset when we were on watch and the little thing decided to fly away and we saw it falling in the sea then trying to get up then crashing again..... Her and Alisha decided to give it a funeral by singing 'Away in a Manger' They said, "Well thats the only God song we know....."
This is a Meditterranean Bee Eater, Ali actually caught this one at night in his hands and then made it a little nest in the ropes with one of my tops. He tried to feed it biscuits too which it didn't go for, not surprising considering the name!
This was our last little visitor on the morning of day two who stayed for a few hours under the spray hood.
The windy on the nosey conditions continued right through day two and life on board was uncomfortable to say the least, cooking dinner was always a bit of a challenge, more so when Alisha insisted on helping. This is both of us tied to the new cooker rail which Ali made for me this winter. It got it's real first usage this trip and it is great to be able to lean back rather than trying to balance in precarious positions to do the cooking when rough. When I first saw the galley on this boat I was amazed as it is so much bigger than the old Islay Mist but much more difficult to cook in when at sea as you actually want to be wedged into a tight corner sometimes!
Our rigging made very strange creaking and banging noises when we were jumping up and down in the waves. Unbeknown to me Ali was so worried about this he had the bolt cutters on hand on one of his watches - just incase the mast came down. I thought he was just being nice letting me do my watches with a fully reefed main...... We have been worried about our rigging ever since we had a cracked spreader last year and this trip finalised in our minds that something hadto be done about it and quick, you'll read more about that in our Malta blog!
Early the next morning the wind died and we motor sailed the whole of the rest of the way to Sicily, since it was still a lumpy sea it was a long long day but at least we made it!
Just as the girls got up on day three we had a lovely surprise - dolphins swam alongside our bow for about half an hour. It totally helped the girls to forget their feeling of seasickness and there were squeals of delight for a while instead of moaning!
The girls entertaining themselves in the cockpit once it was calm. Don't know what this game was about but I caught a bit about ninja star wars barbies!?
Our excitement from the trip wasn't over as we were motoring about amile from the harbour at siracuse the boat started juddering- a sure sign something has caught on the propeller. It was almost like fate, we could see where we wanted to go. I said to Ali he better fix it out here as the water in the bay at Siracuse is notoriously filthy and he wouldn't want to be jumping into that! Thankfully though a bit of forward and reversing and huge pieces of a sheet of polythene started falling away behind the boat and after ten minutes everything was back to normal. Incidentally the water IS filthy in Siracuse when we saw it Ali was very glad not to have to get into it! When you pull your anchor up lots of oozing sewage smelling mud comes up with it, not nice!
Yay! coming into the anchorage next to Siracuse! What a great sight after a three day sail. It was a great night's sleep in a lovely flat calm anchorage helped on by a bottle of wine - we thought we deserved a reward after the last three days!
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