09 November 2010; Ionian Sea.

By midnight we were rounding the South point of the Peloponnesus, sailing through the strait and keeping Nissos Kythera to the South of us. It was fairly quiet for a change. We saw numerous ships at anchor in the lee of the land. Small ships probably waiting for the weather to get better before they continued their voyage. It continued to blow quite hard but the wind had not had much time yet to build up the waves. As the Mediterranean is basically an inland sea there is no ocean swell or tide and that means that any waves that you encounter are generated by the wind. As soon as the wind stops the waves disappear as well. Thus until we cleared the Nissos Kythera the ship was fairly steady and most guests made it to bed before the wobbling started.

A overview of the weather in Europe. Dark blue and purple means light winds, green, yellow and red etc. the nasty stuff.

This whole weather is caused by a weather system laying over Great Britain which is now moving slowly towards the Bay of Biscay. That means it is putting a nice wedge between high and low pressure system in the Mediterranean Sea region and that creates wind. High’s over the western side of Africa, low’s over the middle of Europe and there the South Westerly wind starts blowing. Slowly and steadily the Prinsendam got livelier. By lunch time we were in the middle of the Ionian Sea, which is the part of the Mediterranean Sea to the East of Sicily. There were still some waves left over from the Northerly winds that had blown there the day before. The two wave patterns together created a nice mix and for most of the afternoon the Prinsendam pitched and occasionally slammed on the waves while the wind gave no indication of abating. We are sailing with a full house and although most of our guests are very experienced sailors, room service was very busy today and also the fruit section in the Lido was in high demand.

By the evening the ship came in the lee of Sicily and the waves started to die down. A good thing too, as I was starting to lose time. A pitching ship loses speed and it has no use to go faster as the extra engine energy only causes the ship to slam more instead of adding speed to it. It will now all depend on the weather on the other side of the Strait of Messina how good our progress will be to Naples our first port of call. On the weather chart is also shows that the weather in that area has been very bad but if the wind and the swell are going to run sufficiently with us, then the Prinsendam can make good speed as with her hull form she can really surf on following waves. So hope and pray.

Unfortunately we had to make our Strait of Messina transit in the dark this time. there was no other option in the schedule. I had hoped to be there by 22.30 but we nearly lost an hour during the day due to the pitching ship and subsequent speed loss. So it was 23.30 before we approached the pilot station. During our approach, we were quite cheerfully informed by the pilot on duty that there would be a delay of 30 minutes at least, as there were four ships and only 3 pilots. Now I will really need following winds at the other side to arrive at Naples at a bit of a decent time.