Pitufa.at

The Liparian islands are spectacular islands with smoking volcanoes, steep black cliffs and many coves. Today we take a look at the town of Lipari. The facades are touristy, but the houses behind crumbling away…

The Strait of Messina proved to be a difficult leg: strong currents, fallwinds, strong headwinds, high waves between Taormina and the entry of the strait. As soon as we left this witches cauldron we were becalmed again.

was not that easy…

Yesterday found us still south of Italy. Because of the calm weather it’s taken us a full week to sail from Dubrovnik to Taormina!
We celebrated my birthday yesterday by floating around in completely calm waters, sweating, cleaning up the mess in our fuel storage locker (one of the cans seems to leak, but we still don’t know which one) and waiting for wind. Not a single breeze tickled Italians toes… The highlight of the day was dinner. Munching two marvelous curries and sipping a bottle of sparkling wine, we forgot about the frustrations of the day.
During the night there were some fickle winds from different directions and we ended up motoring along for a while, because it’s just too dangerous to stand in the middle of the “Street of Messina” with freighters rushing by
Early in the morning the wind finally came and Pitufa flew under full sails clause-hauled towards Mount Etna.

…

After sailing with an average speed of less than 2 kn for a couple of days, we unpacked and repaired our blister (a light-wind sail) today and experienced sailing again. However, with no wind at all, also a blister cannot do magic and so we are just drifting around again now. It’s incredibly hot, the boat is rolling, the sails are flapping and we have to remind ourselves that we are determined to enjoy such calms

finally…

After the leisurely bay-hopping down the Croatian coast, our trip to Sicily feels like the first real cruising and we’ve quickly got into the rhythm of night watches. With the lovely warm weather we have they’re not tiring, as the watch can play with Leeloo, read a book or watch the impressive night sky. We’ve had very light winds till now, making only 100 nm in 2 days, but instead of motoring, we slowly sail on. When the wind dies we just go swimming, clean the boat, cook extravagant meals, watch dolphins, count floating plastic bags (20 an hour, humanity just doesn’t deserve this beautiful planet…) write blog entries, and enjoy the deceleration of life in general .

Today we cleared out from CRO in Dubrovnik. Our course is towards the strait of Otranto and then towards Sicily. At the moment a very light wind is carrying us southwards. This entry has been sent via HF radio

Our last stop here in Croatia is Dubrovnik. We’ll do some shopping here, the laundry, organise some things and then head towards Sicily. Unfortunately our kindle was weaker than Christian’s elbow, so we won’t be able to report as regularly as before.

Each lonely anchorage seems even more beautiful than the last one. Today’s resembles a Norwegan Fjord

We had a quick smooth sail to beautiful Korcula, but the anchorage here requires strong nerves – like the parking lot of a shopping centre one day before xmas…

Yesterday we decided to drop the anchor after only 16nm in a lovely bay on Scedro we had visited two yars ago. We are not the only ones here this time though. Nevertheless we stayed another day. Today we were busy with all sorts of things

Today we made 40 nm in 6 hours, but even though we were running downwind it was quite uncomfy with gusts of 35 kn and we were glad to find a sheltered bay on Hvar.