Palermo

Palermo
After arriving back in Palermo on Mon 16th, Amy & Drew flew back to London on evening of Tues 17th and we’ve stayed here since. Firstly we had a bit of shopping and re provisioning to do plus the inevitable few small jobs. But apart from that, Palermo is an amazing place and we’ve just enjoyed seeing some of the sights. Palermo has a very long history and there are many buildings still standing from about the 13-14 th Centuries, some of which we’ve been visiting. The weather has been fine but got very windy in the last couple of days – 20-25 knots – so we decided to see some more sights in Palermo rather than battle the elements. John arrives in Palermo on Mon 23rd so we now don’t want to travel too far but we plan to take off from here on Mon or Tues for as cruise Westwards for a few days. After John leaves we will head Eastwards to the Aolian Islands, the Straits of Messina, Syracuse, the SW coat of Italy and then across to Corfu to arrive by Mid May.
Equipment: Envoy is a superbly equipped vessel which was a major consideration in buying her – see our blog entry dated 5 Dec '06 . While in Palermo we have bought an additional 130 m of 20 mm anchor warp and some 10 mm chain to rig up a combi rope / chain anchor for use when we anchor in deep water. Sometimes you need to anchor in very deep (by our standards) water eg 30-40 m and we’re reluctant to use our main anchor and chain at that sort of depth.
Secondly we’ve bought an additional inflatable. Envoy has an excellent 3.6 m centre console RIB with 25 HP 4-stroke Yamaha, depth sounder, vhf, nav lights, bilge pump, integral fuel tank. But this weighs about 350 kg and can only be launched in very calm weather from the boat deck (on top of the saloon roof) using the boom and electric winches. This process takes about 30 mins to launch and the same to retrieve. Also the dinghy cannot really be launched except in an anchorage and cannot be rowed. All rather inconvenient if you just want to go 100 m to shore for a walk. So we bought an additional smaller inflatable – a 2.7 m with 2.2 HP 4-stroke Honda which in total weighs around 50 kg. This can be easily launched and retrieved by hand and can be rowed too.
Technical: the master loo is working fine again and the shower sump is too (some crud in the water strainer). There are always small jobs to do on a boat but “touch wood” at present things are working fine except for one vhf which has a power supply problem and a bilge water level alarm which does not work.