Richard writes the well-researched, informative blogs on history, art, culture in general really. Aside from the food-related ones just now, mine tend to be more about our travels, washing our smalls, doing the shopping etc. So, here’s another amble around our domestics on the north coast of Sicily.
As you may recall, we spent a few nights in our arrival port of Trapani, waiting for the weather to improve again. This has set the scene for much of our journey this time. Check the weather, scurry out early, get into a marina or anchor up, do lots of sightseeing, and wait for the next weather window.
We anchored up in Cefalu. This meant that we had to get the dinghy out to get ashore. Fortunately, this was much easier than the first time around, and eventually Ursa Minor was inflated and sitting pretty on the water [Ed, you are welcome!].
Mind you, getting in and out of the dinghy is not something I can do elegantly. I can’t just step onto the rubber surround and then step ashore or down into the dinghy. Nope. My best way is for us to get the dinghy tight up against the boarding platform – this could be the bathing platform on Missy Bear where we get on /off Ursa Minor, or it could be a concrete dinghy dock used by boats to flub ashore. I usually scrabble onto the platform by kneeling across, resulting in scraped knees, skimmed shins, and generally waving my fat bottom in Richard’s face [Ed, no comment].
We flubbed ashore to the concrete dinghy quay at San Pietro on Panarea, one of the Aeolian Islands, which is apparently host to many of the celebrities you could read about in Hello magazine. The Aeolian Islands are named after the wind god Aeolus, who gave a bag of [Ed, contrary] winds (with the exception of the west wind) to Odysseus to help him get home after the Trojan Wars. When his land was in sight, he sank into a deep sleep. But his sailors thought the bag contained gold, and opened it, thus driving the ship back to the islands instead of home.
Anyway, back to the dinghy story… there is a high concrete quay in San Pietro, where you can tie up your dinghy, but you alight at a lower platform with some steps, and pull the dinghy along out of the way to tie it up. The first day, I got ashore very successfully, but the second time, there were two large open containers of fishing nets on the lower platform. I got ashore and reached over to hold the dinghy for R, and immediately got the fishing nets wrapped around two buttons at the bottom of my shortie trousers. I could not get free. In the end, Richard had to un-button me from the fine mesh very surreptitiously so as not to alert the local fisherman.
It reminded me of the time I was asked a favour by my counselling partner when I worked at Andersen’s. A friend of his had asked him to find an IT manager for a new media company (I seem to think it was the very early days of British Satellite Broadcasting, i.e., what became Sky). He hadn’t really done anything about it, and asked me if I would just pop along and be interviewed to save face. I wore a grey pinstripe suit (skirt, not trousers in those days), and the skirt was straight with a slit up the back held together by large buttons. Unfortunately, I had to sit on a slatted chair, and when the interview was over, and I stood up, I had caught a button through the gap and took the chair up on my bottom. The guy who interviewed me had to come around and free me. I politely turned down the second interview, but I do wonder occasionally, given the explosion of satellite television, what if…
Before we went out to the Aeolian Islands, we booked ourselves in to a large marina at Capo D’Orlando. The website said it had water, power, restaurants, and on on-site mini-market. We needed to provision and fill up our water tanks so a perfect place. When we got there, we discovered that the mini-market had closed for the season, and most of the bars and restaurants closed up late afternoon. It reminded me of the set for one of the original zombie movies, where they come out after dark in a big shopping mall. Luckily for us, there was an excellent pizza place still open, so we treated ourselves to a takeaway. The marina office recommended a taxi company to get us to a supermarket. A lovely woman turned up, drove us to a mid-size Spar, and said she’d wait for us. We ran around as if we were doing one of those trolley dashes. [Ed, on the way there we saw the superb water spout (mini tornado over water) and a rainbow in the same shot.]
Panarea was a strange island. We arrived at lunch time on our first day, and anchored up in the bay of the little town. It was quite buzzy, lots of day tripper boats, a few ferries picking up lots of people, which should have been a clue. Late afternoon, we were joined by another yacht, and by 10pm there were quite a few boats swinging on their hook in the bay. The water was lovely and warm, we swam and enjoyed being there. The next morning, we went back ashore for a longer walk, expecting a bit of a buzz when we got to the quay at San Pietro. It was a completely different town. A solitary day tripper boat pulled up and discharged a couple of bemused-looking passengers who wondered where everyone was. I popped into the mini-market opposite the quay. It had stretches of empty shelves, absolutely no fresh fruit or veg but it did have a good supply of Dom Perignon champagne at, I think, €245 per bottle. That amazed me – if you were a celeb coming to stay on the island, surely you, or your minions, would order a sufficient supply to save you the embarrassment of popping out to your local corner shop for more champers, dahling?
After our walk, we called into the Bar Dell Porto for a plate of pasta (the one with oysters and sea urchins). The owner told us that it was so quiet now, she would probably close up for the winter the following week. And the island really did have that end-of-season feel about it.
We stayed anchored in the bay for the second night, and actually we were joined by a few yachts again, so we weren’t completely on our own, and the following morning had a lovely sunny sail down to the island of Lipari. We had tried to get into the marina in the main town of Lipari, but it had closed for the season. Well, what a surprise, but we ended up in a surprisingly busy marina about thirty minutes’ walk away. Lots of charter boats arrived, but it is probably their last port of call before returning to base at the weekend. We enjoyed our walk into town, and our visit to the splendid museum, but decided to eat on board rather than play dodgems with Italian drivers along a road with no pavement.
And from there, we headed down to Melazzo, and around the Straits of Messina. And that’s in another blog.