Marsala in Sicily

After leaving Tunisia on Sunday morning and this was delayed because we managed to fuel up much faster than expected so we were ready before 12 which was the time we had told the various authorities when we arrived and they weren’t all there so had to drive back to the port! Odd system.
The trip was uneventful, it took 20hours and yet again wasn’t the beautiful flat trip I had hoped for. The one odd experience we had was early on, we were motoring along with foresail up to steady us, when we saw a yacht on the horizon but it kept changing direction it was like watching a North Atlantic convoy, was we got closer we concluded they kept going in circles and were fishing but still weird! We encountered very little other traffic until it got dark when we appeared to be crossing the main shipping channel with radar blobs in all directions but at least the shift passed quicker. We arrived in Sicily a port called Marsala, yes where the fortified wine is made, at 7:30am I awoke when we came through pier heads and John slowed the boat so no preparation and there were 3 small marinas didn’t know VHF channels which were big enough or anything. Luckily a marinara was already at work repairing pontoons and saw us milling and directed us in and helped with mooring up, he then suggested we breakfast as office wasn’t open yet.
We did as suggested and after checkin* in went to get our Costituto as we had arrived from non EU country I don’t think anyone else does this as took ages to find papers and complete, we also did more shopping then rested before walking into town and being surprised how pleasant it was as the marina area was a bit grim. On our walk home we found a link to our own island a donkey.Read more