Vibo Victoria 38.43N/16.08E

This morning we went through the Straits of Messina.

And all this time in travail, sobbing, gaining on the current, we rowed into the Strait Scylla to port and on our starboard beam Charybdis, dire gorge of the salt sea tide. By heavens! When she vomited all the sea was like a cauldron seething over intense fire, when the mixture suddenly heaves and rises.

According to Homer, that’s what poor old Odysseus faced when he came through from the north.

Despite three emails from my brother (more than Odysseus got) with details of the tide tables (for Gibraltar, as curiously the pilot bases passage times on Gibraltar) and advice from two locals in the marina who looked up the Messina tide tables to recommend the ideal time for going through the straits, we got it completely wrong, and as we went past Scilla had five knots of tide against us so crawled through with a speed of only 2 knots over the ground.. Fortunately, it was neaps, and the wind was from the north ie wind with tide, (it’s when you get wind over tide that you get the bad conditions.) so we weren’t bothered too much by the conditions. Nevertheless, we saw some pretty impressive whirlpools and eddies. (The locals call them bastardi, a particularly appropriate name!)

So we weren’t much better off than Odysseus: he may not have had accurate tables, but he had at least been warned by Circe of Scylla, the renderand Charybdis (the "sucker-down"). In fact conditions were probably much worse two and a half thousand years ago, as a major earthquake in the early 18th century is thought to have altered the configuration of the bottom to some extent and tamed Scylla and Charybdis.

As we came through the straits we saw three of the strange swordfish-catching boats that are such a feature of the area. Swordfish is a great local delicacy and very expensive so its worth spending some money to try and catch them. Apparently the fish sleep on the surface, so if you can creep up on them while they are dozing you can harpoon them, and they have special fishing boats to do this. The boats have an enormously tall lattice-work mast 70 or 80 feet high, and a bowsprit even longer, all supported with wires and struts - a most bizarre sight: they look as though they are going to topple over. The skipper is hauled up the mast with a power winch, and he scours the sea around for one of these poor fish.; when they sight one they creep up on it until the end of the bowsprit is right over it, and then harpoon it. What a rotten thing to do!

Anyway, we then had an uneventful trip along the coast till we reached Vibo. This is obviously a major tourist area for the Italians; miles of white sandy beaches covered with umbrellas, though at present few bodies under them. We think the season is just beginning.

As we moved up the coast, we had put the first of the wine-boxes we had bought in Sicily in the fridge, and were looking forward with great anticipation to sampling it once we reached Vibo. DISASTER. The man who got us the wine boxes in Segesta gave us the wrong ones, in fact he gave us the one wine neither of us could drink, so we have 25 litres of undrinkable plonk!!!!

We’re being brave about it.

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