We arrived to our old favourite town in Sicily, Riposto, where our agent was as kind and Italian as usual.  ‘Mamma Mia’ was his favoured phrase for everything whether good or bad!  We awoke on our second night there at 3am after being thrown out of our beds rather ceremoniously and quickly ran up on deck to see the wind speed rapidly increasing up to 55 knots, eek!  Concerto has a fairly high windage especially with wind straight on the beam and being moored alongside a concrete wall didn’t help matters.  Whilst Gordon ran around with fenders and lines, I acted as a weight on the passarelle to ensure it didn’t go flying.  It took us about 1 ½ hours to secure her completely whilst another yacht had promptly unfurled its gib and a large 50m powerboat managed to scrape and dent a 5m section of its hull against the wall so we seemed to be lucky to escape unscathed.

I did my fish buying whilst in Riposto because they have fantastic fishmongers all lined up in their shops and the market along the waterfront.  We would quite often walk past and see some of the largest tuna I have ever seen.  We’d learnt last time we were here in Sicily that the Sicilian waters are the best fishing waters in the whole Med and even the Japanese own a section of the waters to provide sashimi-grade fish to Japan.  I walked into one fishmongers and 10 minutes later had purchased everything I wanted to (something which doesn’t happen very often!) bar the shop giving my purchased goods to the wrong customer prompting a street chase.

We then departed for our charter destination of Milazzo on the north coast of Sicily near the end of the Messina Straits and headed out into a complete downpour and large waves tumbling in from the big winds that had been passing through.  Eight hours later, we were safely moored in Milazzo for final charter preparations and with our fingers crossed that the weather would change for the better because we were both looking forward to another trip out to the lovely Aeolian Islands.

Clare