30 April, Sailing around Italy.

The only problem with Italy being a long and narrow peninsula is that you have to sail a long way south and then west to get to the other side. Due to the shape of the land we call it in Europe the “Italian Boot” with Sicily as some sort of football located at the tip of that boot. Maybe that is the reason why Italy is such a soccer mad country, the whole land is shaped like it.

We had once again nice weather with a slight brownish haze. The brown color is caused by the sand in the air that is transported by the wind from the Far East. Every morning we find a thin layer of sand on the decks and that makes my chief officer curse as it is a continuous job to get the sand of the ship again. At the same time we are hampered by local port regulations to do so. Quite a few ports do not allow washing the decks anymore while in port. The logic behind it being, that they are afraid of oil being washed into the water as well. That we are a clean and well maintained cruise ship makes no difference. The rules are the same for everybody. Thus the sailors of the deck department do their best while at sea but as the ship spends a lot of time in port the hours available are limited. Hence a dusty looking ship after a windy night.

Another strange result of the sand in the wind is that it acts as a sanding paper. The ship has wooden railings along the decks and on the balconies and these are greatly affected by the sand. When the ship sails it already creates a relative wind of 20 knots caused by the ships speed. If the real wind is against us, then the total relative wind force can go up to 40 or 50 knots over the deck and that is storm force.

With this relative wind whistling around the ship, it pushes the sand particles with the same speed along the hull. Causing the phenomena that the sand is “sanding” off the varnish from the wooden railings which are starting to look bare. That does not help the image of an immaculate maintained cruise ship at all. We do “touch up” as much as we can, but as soon as we leave for Northern Europe we will have to take all the railings off one by one and completely revarnish them. For the guests with balcony cabins we take the complete railing out and substitute it with a temporary one. In that way they are not affected by wet varnish.

The fishing boats were out in force yesterday and of course exactly on the tracks of the deep-sea vessels, including us. Why, nobody knows, but it seems that the fishing is always the best there where the big ships are passing by. When looking at the radar you see all the fishing boats congregating in the area around our projected course line and a few miles to the West or a few miles to the East there is nobody. We try to go around the whole fleet as much as possible but on the other hand we still have to get to our destination within a set time frame. So with two navigators behind the radar (one navigating, the other checking the safe progress) we zig zag between the fishing boats keeping them all at a safe distance.

By midnight we came to the south side of the Italian boot and whether the people in this area do not like fish, or the current is wrong, but here we never see fishing boats. You do see a increase in commercial traffic, as it is near the Strait of Messina, the waterway between Sicily and the Italian Mainland. Traffic approaches here from the South, South West and South East and also goes in those directions, coming out of the Strait. The strait of Messina or Stretto di Messina in Italian is named after the town of Messina on Sicily which is our next port of call tomorrow.