Monthly Archives: October 2008

Exploring Ortygia, Old Town Siracusa

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The plan was to get up early and move the boat to the sea wall, then go site seeing. Eric ran over to the wall to make sure there was still space, and much to his dismay, there was none. The wall was completely full. Darn.

It is now peak tourist season and the marina we are at has cranked up its prices, and for this month only they were charging a crazy $105 USD per night. It’s a rolly marina , too. We decided to anchor out. The anchorage was flat as a pancake and had less traffic than the marina, so it should be calmer than the marina.

We decided to move after lunch. We went back through the gate into Ortygia and found a little café located in the walkway between two apartment buildings. The actual restaurant was run out of one of the apartments, with tables and chairs set up along the walkway. Of course, there were no tables in front of anyone’s door, so at least the residents could get in and out of their houses. We thought it was neat that the tenants of these buildings had a restaurant not next door but literally at their front doors.

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Eric likes proscuittio and melon. He was excited when Continue reading →

Welcome to Siracusa, Sicily, Italy

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By 0200, radio was quiet. The Monkey Boy must be out of range now.

We arrived at around 1000 local time. From the distance, we could see the walls of the fort in the water. We had emailed the marina a few days ago to try to get a reservation, and they never responded. We pulled inside the marina, where a worker signaled us to go around back to the outside floating docks. We went where directed, and saw he was standing in front of an open spot. The slip wasn’t much wider than Kosmos. Eric backed Kosmos in slowly, as Christi stood in back pushing us off the boats on either side to help keep centered. The worker tied up the back lines for us and handed us two mooring lines. Eric walked the first line to the front attached the first line with no problem. The second line was too short to tie off. The guy on the boat next to us saw Eric was struggling and jumped from his boat onto ours. The two of them tied one of our ropes to the mooring line to make it long enough to tie off.

Oh, and to clarify how the mooring lines work. The boats always back in. The mooring(s) is/are where the nose of the boat is. There are lines that go from the sea wall/floating dock to the mooring. You take the rope from the sea wall and walk it to the front of your boat, then pull on the line to get it as tight as you can, then tie it to a cleat (metal bar installed around the boat and on docks specifically meant for tying lines on to) at the front of your boat. Since the lines spend most of their time underwater, they are disgusting, full of algae and barnacles. The lines get your hands and clothes all dirty. They are nicknamed “slime lines”. We found out that most of the marinas in the Med use this system (though D-Marin in Turkey has old fashioned moorings where you have to use your boat hook to grab the mooring line or have someone in a dinghy hand it up to you).

Once we were securely berthed, we gave the marina worker a crew list and our vessel documentation. Since we are checked into the EU that is apparently all the paperwork we need to do. We didn’t seem to need to go and visit any authorities. Hmmm. It seems too good to be true that the paperwork is virtually non-existent.

It was weird to stand in the cockpit (back deck) and stare out at buildings that are hundreds of years old. Many are run down, but considering how old they are, they really don’t look that bad. A lot of them have fancy facades and appointments, and in their day were probably glorious. We haven’t actually been docked so close to a historic area before, and we found it to be sort of awe inspiring.

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We were starving, so went in search of food. The old part of Siracusa is called Continue reading →

History of Sicily

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Like most of the countries in the world, Italy has a long and rich history. People groups, empires, dominant powers, and borders have all changed over and over again throughout the progression of time. The history of Sicily and the southernmost part of the Italian peninsula is dramatically different from the northern regions of Italy, so to keep things simple, we are only reporting on the history of Sicily.

Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean, located just southwest of the end of the Italian Peninsula. It currently has 5 million inhabitants. The original inhabitants of Sicily are believed to be Continue reading →

Passage from Pylos, Greece to Syracusa, Italy

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According to the forecast, the sea conditions looked good, so yesterday morning we got ready to go and headed out around 1230. Shortly after pulling out, someone came on the radio calling out a “Securite! Securite! We have a situation at X coordinates. There is a load of bananas in the water”. Then a few minutes later, we heard someone calling the “Banana Port Control” for permission for the “monkey ship to enter”. Oh no. Is the Monkey Boy (the radio abuser aboard some ship) back? Or just people making fun of him? The banana talk died, and we thought no more of it.

Seas were relatively calm and it has been a smooth and uneventful ride. Our speeds were excellent given the RPM. With the exception of currents, our speed really is determined by the wave height. The smaller the waves, the faster we go.

The sunset was spectacular once again, turning into a bright red glow of fire and casting a soft pink glow on the sea.

At 2100, the Monkey Boy came onto the radio. Sigh. It really was him earlier. He started by calling out “Mayday! Mayday from the banana boat!”, then Continue reading →

Sightseeing Around the Pylos Area

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This morning we rented a scooter to go site seeing. Since renting the scooter in Aghios Nickolaos, Eric has wanted to get another one. Neither of our two tourist guides mentions Pylos at all, but the scooter rental place gave us a map listing the tourist attractions of the area.

We headed south to go to the town of Methoni, where a castle is located. We had seen the fort from Kosmos yesterday on our way to Pylos and it looked beautiful, so we were eager to see it up close.

The landscape between the towns was mostly olive groves and scrubby plants on rolling hills. There were a couple industrial stores and a handful of homes, but for the most part there was no development between the towns. It was a nice drive.

When we arrived at the castle, we saw admission was free, so we were expecting it to be a dud. We were surprised to find that it was actually quite good, with some of it very well preserved. It is much better than the castle at Kos.

The castle was originally built by the Venetians in 1209 and expanded many times over the next 200 years. You walk in on a fancy stone bridge over a now dry moat, through a grand entrance gate. The entrance was an addition in made in 1714. When the entrance was made, there was an easily removable wooden bridge resting on pillars of stone. In the early 1800’s the permanent and decorative stone bridge was added. Once inside, there is a fairly long walkway where you have nothing but huge walls on either side of you.

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At the end of the walkway are the gates into the castle complex. When we stepped through the gate, we were taken aback at how large it is. It covers much more land mass than you realize looking at it from both sea and land. This photo does not Continue reading →