Sicilia

We left Vibo Valentia on Monday afternoon after restocking and fuelling for the first time. We decided to just keep going rather than stop for the night and arrived in Palermo 24 hours later, this being our first ever through the night cruise. All went smoothly and there was little “traffic”.
In Envoy you don’t have the time flexibility we are used to from our previous faster boats. You’re only doing about 7 knots so that’s about 50 miles in a comfortable day’s cruising and you have to plan carefully where you’re going to stop next. Its mostly not safe or practical to arrive in an anchorage or marina after dark but it is practical to keep going through the night.
The reason you can’t arrive in a marina after dark is because you need their help to dock and need to know where to dock and they’re not there after about 1800.
You’re well offshore in very deep (1500 ft) water with no reefs, rocks, shoals. There’s only other boats to worry about and that’s only ships – we’ve hardly seen any other pleasure boats away from the marinas. You track them on radar from about 12 miles out because they’re going damn quick compared with us.
On arrival in Palermo we firstly went to a marina called Villia Igiea. It’s well set up but about 45 mins walk from Palermo and also very expensive at Euro 93 per night. So the next day we walked into Palermo and found the Yacht Club del Mediterraneo which has berths just outside “La Cala” – the old port. We met the President of the yacht club and organised to move Envoy here where the cost is Euro 28 per night and where we can walk to the town centre in about 5 mins.
Palermo has tonnes of character. It’s quite run down with virtually no recent development and a lot of derelict buildings but also very historical. Amy arrives to see us today so we’ll see some of the surrounding coastline and some of the sights of Palermo with her.
Sealife
So far we’ve seen porpoises on three occasions, a whale and some sharks. Also more bird life than we expected so the Med is not so desolate as we expected. You often see people fishing from the shore, jetties etc but they seem to catch mostly what we call sprats and they keep them.