Crossing to Sicily – Trapani
16 May 2017 | Trapani, Sicily
C&C
We wanted to leave at a time that guaranteed a daylight arrival in a new harbour, so with a planned crossing time of 26/27 hours getting away in the morning gave us lots of leaway.
Splice nosed out of Villasimius Marina at 7.45hrs with little wind but as we cleared the bay the wind increased until 30 minutes later we were able to hoist the gennaker (the large sail at the bow) to join our mainsail and blast away from Sardinia at 7+ knots in 16-18knots of wind on the starboard quarter. This continued through the morning and we had an enjoyable sail for around 4 hours until the wind started to die down as forecast. By late afternoon the instruments were showing only about 5 knots of wind and overnight the average was 2 knots, we of course were motoring.
During the trip we had three visits from pods of dolphins playing in our bow wave and we sailed over a turtle! We were doing 7 knots under sail and Chris, looking astern, saw this brown blob pop out from under the boat, it took a second to realise that it was a rather astonished turtle flapping around in our wake. It was lucky he went straight down the middle of the hulls as we didn’t see him coming at all. We cooked a pasta dish for dinner around 20.00hrs and then took watches of 2-3 hours though the night depending on how tired we felt.
It was very quiet with little traffic but as usual the oddities arrived on Carolyn’s watch – wake up Captain! The strangest was a vessel that we both took to be coming in from our starboard bow as we could see her red port light, this means we had to give way. However after slowing down to do so and watching for a while we realised she wasn’t moving and had various other odd lights including a flashing white (this normally marks a buoy and boats don’t carry these). In the end we continued and motored carefully past at a good distance only to find more red lights on her starboard and no obvious navigation lights at all. We concluded that some form of ‘drift fishing’ was happening (for sailors: this is in circa 300m of water so she wasn’t CBD or aground, the light shape did not align with NUC or any fishing boat eg nets caught on obstruction) and later on Chris’s watch we saw another two similar vessels – you learn something every time!
Other than this the night passed easily and as dawn broke we were about 25 miles off the Sicilian coast. With the rising of the sun the wind re-appeared from on our bow and managed 16-18 knots rather than the forecast 8-9, always the way. So we had a bumpy last couple of hours into Trapani harbour. (Make sure you call ‘Trapani VTS’ before entering on channel 10, they get nasty and fine you if you don’t, we had read lots of comments on this so were fine).
We tried a couple of the small marinas over to the north west of the harbour but as this was 09.00hrs on a Sunday there was no-one there and no obvious berth to take. We returned to Marina Ventro di Mistrale in the less sheltered eastern end of the port. There we met a very helpful and enthusiastic marinario called Christian who showed us into a very shallow berth which we had to use ‘bows to’ due to rubble on the seabed. The Captain had a few kittens as both the depth alarms were screaming – 0.2 under the keel - but we got safely secured.
The trip took us 25 hours so ahead of schedule due to the good winds early on. We checked in with a very friendly lady in the office. Gabriella spoke very good English and was keen to share lots of information on the town and its history. You don’t meet many marina teams with the level of enthusiasm and helpfulness shown here. The cost per night was E80 so not cheap and like much of the Italian infrastructure we have seen was somewhat ramshackle but the people made it a great place to stay.
Photo: A happy Dolphin shows off!