Crotone, Italy

After crossing the Ionian Sea, the instep of Italy’s boot, the weather closed in. The forecast showed 4 days of over 35 knots wind (about 65 km/h) and so we’ve had an unscheduled rest break in the nearest port deep enough to hold us: Crotone.

With a few days of what almost feels like a break we’ve also finally had time and no excuse but to create our newsletter and website format. 

It’s a task that, as the journey has gone on, has become ever more daunting -- the later we left it, the bigger the catch up. Having left it now much too late, we have the difficult job of trying to sum up what has happened so far. 

Rather than one mega post, we’ve split it into a few smaller ones that try to sum up the various phases. It’s at least 50% for us to remember what happened, but hopefully, if you’re interested, you can have a browse through to absorb a little of the flavour of the last two months.

Crotone has been our first big stop in a marina and so we’ve at first had to get used to the eye-watering marina fees. Our hopes to use the down time here to do work on the boat have also come to not much, in part because of difficult communication but also because we’ve been using the days for Studio work. 

We still found time to walk around in the mornings, stretching our legs and taking advantage of the Naval club’s toilets. The old city is charming, perhaps mostly because it is almost completely empty of businesses and instead exudes the small sounds of domesticity. The general ugliness of the rest of the town mostly serves to make the walls of the fortress seem grander.

We settled up our bill with the Lega Navale club for the mooring this afternoon and are planning a few small jaunts down the coast and across the Messina Strait to Catania on Monday.

C+R