Doug and Sandy on their Privilege 49 catamaran Sah Sen, lead the way out of the anchorage in darkness at 5.30 am the next morning. We entered the traffic separation zone for the Strait of Messina at 6.35 am, between cargo ships, tankers, and a cruise ship. The Northern entrance was barely one and a half miles wide, and we could see several whirlpools and many eddies which pushed the boats around for the first 10 minutes.
We had read that the tidal flow was due in part to the Tyrrhenian Sea being warmer and saltier than the Ionian Sea, as well as being influenced by the tidal change at the Strait of Gibraltar.
It would have been daunting on a full spring tide, but we made it past “The Sucker-down” and ”The Render” (Charybdis and Scilla in the Odyssey), without mishap!
As we passed the town of Messina on the West coast of Sicily, the cruise ship that entered behind us crossed our bows on its way to the cruise ship terminal downtown, where it took up the whole of the waterfront and dwarfed the buildings in the area.
There were 30 or 40 little fishing boats out for the morning bite, and a coast guard inflatable herded a few out of the channel ahead of some of the transiting ships. The most interesting craft we saw was a swordfish boat which had a huge tower like a mast sticking up 50 plus feet off the deck. Through the binoculars I could make out a person at the top of it, yikes! We didn’t see any Swordfish but we did see dolphins and porpoise, and flying fish (I love those little guys, they take off and fan out like a jet squadron!). We parted ways at 8 am with Sah Sen heading down the West coast of Sicily to an anchorage at Taormina, and us crossing over to the Italian mainland side, en route to Montenegro via a couple of stops. At least that was the plan ……
