Teulada to Palermo

Left Teulada at 0715.  There was no wind, just a large swell from the rear quarter, making the boat twist and turn.  The technical, nautical term for this is ‘all squirmy’, I think.

Leaving Teulada

The scenery here really is beautiful.

Anyway, we’d gone about 100 miles (I know - but that’s 12 hours for us!) when the sat-nav screens went off suddenly.  In my panic to get it going again I pressed “Follow Route’ as soon as it was up and running again, but the boat decided to start from the beginning – with an immediate ‘U’ turn! (she obviously liked Teulada more than we thought). Being a professional sailor I quickly sorted it out but it left our wake looking a bit like a backwards question mark.

However, within five minutes, a large jet, a bit like a Learjet, came towards us about 50 feet above the water. Scared the s**t out of us, it did!  He then made a tight turn and came back directly behind the boat.  He seemed even lower this time and I would have scribbled graffiti on it, if it had been going slower!  Immediately the radio exploded with “This is the French Navy -  where have you come from?  Where  are you going?  What’s your ETA?  How many persons on board?  What’s your mother’s maiden name, etc?”  I gave him all that,and then he said “Do you have a technical problem as we saw you deviate from your course? How did he KNOW that! Talk about bloody Grand Frere!  It’s very scary.  They must have tracking stuff we don’t even know about! 

Well, this all gets much worse but I’d like to leave it for now to talk about our delightful evening meal…..

On Tuesday, Martin proudly announced that he would be cooking dinner on the trip to Palermo and set off for the supermarket with a determined look on his face.  He returned, even more proudly, with two pork chops, four small potatoes and… wait for it…a tin of mixed vegetables.  And that was it!  He couldn't find any Bisto (surprisingly, they don’t seem to have it Sardinia).

Luckily, in Teulada, we managed to buy four more potatoes and a packet of frozen peas.  And I found a jar of Bisto (unopened, from 2008 – a good year) in my cupboard.  He was very pleased.  Things were starting to look up!

As it happened, the meal was really nice and this photo proves it (sort of)

Proud Martin (isn't that a song?)

Ten out of ten for presentation!

No really, it was great and, of course, cooked to perfection.  I quite like Bisto now!

So, back to the technical stuff…

Shortly after we’d eaten, the sat-nav went off again and wouldn’t come back on.  After unplugging the computers (always works, doesn’t it?) it still wouldn’t come on.  But we still had autopilot, depth, speed, rudder position, wind direction etc didn’t we? … except that we didn’t, as one by one they flickered and died….and we suddenly found ourselves with no means of knowing where we were or where to go.

We have a lot of stuff.   Until it all goes off!

Luckily, I’d recently bought a hand-held sat-nav and, after fiddling with it for 30 minutes, it told me where we were (in the middle of nowhere!) and roughly the direction we had to steer.  Except that trying to hold a course when the boat’s ‘all squirmy’ was nigh on impossible.  So we zig-zagged our way, in pitch black, roughly to where we maybe thought Palermo might be, perhaps – or not.  After two hours, at 1.30am, and having travelled 15 miles (and progressed eight), one of us had an idea.  I think it was me, but there’s a dispute over this.

The sat-nav has its own dedicated battery and, if this wasn’t charging, the battery might be flat.  And this might account for our new disaster.  But the battery seemed OK and it still wouldn’t work. That is, until Martin found a breaker that said ’24V to 12V converter’. He switched it and ‘bingo’ (not ‘bisto’) everything powered up.  Relieved or what!  There was no way we could have carried on manually steering the boat for 14 hours without sleep and arrived safely.  So Martin V saves the day AGAIN!

We think it may be a back-up system that converts the service batteries (24V) to 12V in an emergency.  Which is absolutely what we had!  If we hadn’t found this switch I might have been writing this from Rome.  Anyway, enough of this, but there’s definitely a lesson in here somewhere….

And so to Palermo.  What can I say?  We arrived at 11.15 after 28 hours without sleep.  The marina is awful – oh yes it is – just look at the photo.

And the town is worse! (but we are are on the outskirts of Palermo not in the centre)

We have a rubbish berth, the office is 10 minutes walk from the boat, it took 20 minutes to do the paperwork and they tried to charge me an for an extra night because we arrived before 4pm. (In Sicily, 11.45 to 4.00pm apparently counts as 24 hours).  We settled on €60 for the ‘extra’ time but the bill for two nights was €460!  Oh yes, if you hadn’t slept for 30 hours, you’d be annoyed as well!  And to add insult to injury they charge extra for internet usage, “but the first five minutes is free” – which is nice. Then he added, “but it’s broken at the moment”.  So I’m gonna have to find an internet café to get this out.

Ain’t boating bwilliant!