A first of hopefully many: sailing charter in Sicily

I'm sitting in the airport thinking of all the things I did not get to do before leaving the office, but it's less and less important as the countdown to my flight has started. The event planner is checking out for a couple of weeks my friends... Because tomorrow, I will land in Sicily and take charge of Senza Dubbi, a 32-feet sailboat (Beneteau Oceanis 323), which I will skipper for ten days with my love and sailmate around the beautiful Aeolie Islands. Once there, my office will become my chart table, my onboard navigation system and the vessel helm, and there will be time for little else. What started out two years ago as a pretty crazy idea of going "hitchiking" around the seas of Europe, hoping on and off sailboats volunteering my services as crew during a 7-month sabbatical, culminating in me spending two grueling weeks in the Canary Islands putting myself through the Yachtmaster offshore certification, is now giving life to a longtime dream of mine - chartering sailboats around the world.

We first had to decide what our destination would be, the world is our oyster! It was definitely going to be Europe… but we could only go in October, so it had to be Southern Europe. Croatia was tempting but a tad cold – so we are keeping that one for a near future. We chose Sicily in the end, and now that I think back on it, I am unsure how we came to that. But we love Italy, have lived a few months there during the sabbatical, and I have picked up enough Italian to make sure that we can find the best salumi and enoteca in town.

Next came finding the boat : we wanted it small enough to be manageable for our 1st experience sailing a charter by ourselves (I own a 26 footer in Canada) but large enough to be comfortable, fairly recent, and not too expensive because everything else around it is… After several attempts with larger charter brokers, we decided to go with a smaller local company whose staff have been nothing but charming and helpful (and they speak and write English and French fluently!).

Third in line was downloading the maps (I will most likely do a future posting about navigational systems and navionics VS raster charts, thrilling stuff….), checking out the area and reading up, to which we devoted a couple of weekends in September. Turns out the challenge in navigating these waters is not what we thought it would be… One would guess that the shear fact that the islands are called after the Greek God of Wind who famously hid amongst the islands and gave them his name would mean that it’s pretty windy out there… so the cruising sailor in me was a bit worried about having to spend 10 days racing around the archipelago reefing down the mainsail and holding on to the helm for dear life. But it turns out the few blogs that we did find discussed mostly the difficulty of anchoring off the islands because the biggest isole are actually volcanoes, and the steepness of the coastline means that you’ve got to drop anchor in 80 feet of water even when close to shore. For those of you not familiar with the sailing world, that also means dropping a ratio of about 5 times of anchor line, so 400 feet of it! Consequently, this impressive depths of anchorages combined with a sea bed of loose volcanic rocks or pumice stone seems to make the task of anchoring safely and spending a relaxing night trusting that your anchor will hold the most challenging feature of the islands.

We shall find out soon!