sySpringDawn

We were up early to catch the tide....tide? What's that? We haven't had to worry about tide times since we left Gibraltar! The Strait of Messina, the narrow passage of water between Italy and Sicily is where the Tyrrhennian Sea meets the Ionian Sea. The funnelling effect of the water through the Strait and the different levels of salinity in the two seas creates some very noticable currents and tidal effects.

The Messina Strait is a place of legend and myth most notably Scilla and Charybdis, the two whirlpools on either side of the Strait. Scilla was referred to by Circe as 'the render' and Charybdis 'the sucker-down'. A whirlpool did exist near the town of Scilla until 1783 when an earthquake alterted the local topography. In ancient times, the Strait must have been fearsome to sailors, with its whirlpools, eddies, tides, waterspouts and squalls descending from the mountains.

We chose to hug the Italian coast to start with and then, once in the Strait, to cross the TSS where there's a recognised intersection. For those non-boaty types, a TSS is a traffic separation system for big shipping and if you want to cross over the TSS, you have to do so at right angles to the flow of the traffic. There's a large amount of big, commercial shipping that use the Strait so we were both keeping a sharp look out not just for traffic passing through but also for the numerous ferries going back and forth across it.

Before we crossed over the TSS, we were aware of the boat being jostled around a few degrees from left to right, right to left at various times and the water gave the appearance of boiling beneath the boat - quite weird and not unlike the effect you sometimes see off of Hurst Castle or that we experienced in the Morbihan. Our boat speed stayed at a constant 6 knots, whilst our speed over the ground varied between 4.5 knots and 9.1 knots - weird! We crossed the TSS safely and set the sails for a really good downwind sail for the rest of the trip to Taormina, passing the 'toe' on the end of the 'boot' of Italy as we went.

We anchored for the night in Taormina, a resort town which is popular place to have one's summer villa (there were some really lovely properties tucked into the hillside, hidden amongst trees but I'm afraid my photo doesn't do them justice). In the 19th and 20th centuries Taormina attracted a colony of artists, writers and intellectuals including Otto Geleng, D. H. Lawrence, Truman Capote and Evelyn Waugh. Charles Webster Leadbeater, the theosophical author, discovered that Taormina had the correct magnetic fields for Jiddu Krishnamurti to develop his talents, so the young Krishnamurti stayed here from time to time.

Throughout the evening, we were treated to numerous colourful and noisy firework displays. We're not sure what the occasion was (we think the second Sunday in September may be a significant date in the Catholic calendar) but we thoroughly enjoyed the fireworks - they saved the best til last with a wonderful display at midnight.