Mondello / Fermine - 18-19 October 2021


Our son is coming to visit us next week for our last week of sailing. Most of our plans for the short term are to get the boat to the place where we will meet him. We have concluded that we will be in Balestrate when he arrives, as this is closer to the airport than the city of Palermo. We will then go on further west. This means that we have all of this week to cover very short distances, retracing our steps. We know that we want to spend most of the nights at anchorages and concluded that as there was no wind and where we are is one of the nicest and safest, we would go absolutely nowhere today. It was very relaxing. The weather is back to being hot and sunny, sufficient that we had to put the smaller of our sun covers over the cockpit to provide shade.

The anchorage filled with a few more boats during the day and then emptied out to just 3 or 4 overnight. The boat we had be envying left, en route to Palma di Majorca having spent the day having people ferried back and forward to the shore. We tried without success to work out where they could have been in port. The boat had a 6 metre keel, and we think this is too deep for Palermo, the biggest harbour round here. Presumably that is why they anchored.

Tricia swam most of the way to the shore and back and then we watched the fishermen and other boats.

While we were on deck eating, we became aware of a long line of seabirds in the water. As we watched more and more came. We think that they will have been roosting in the cliffs to one side of the bay, and then in the evening they all come to feed. We could certainly see them gliding on the thermal currents along the cliff face.

On Tuesday we concluded that we couldn't take another day of doing nothing, so we moved on around the headland to Fermine. We anchored as we had done before, with a fine view of the cement factory. At times it belched dirty smoke from its chimney and we were glad that the wind was blowing it away from us. The bay would be very pretty if the factory was not there, so we did our best to look the other way.



As dusk fell we were visited again by the local fishermen. As before, one came over to us to ask how long we were staying and to point out where his nets were. They were well marked with prominent flags on buoys and lights once it was dark. He must have had a lot of trouble in the past with people driving though the nets and damaging them. We were grateful for his vigilance.

Finally we had a spectacular sunset to enjoy.

Steve (and Tricia)

Distance today               9 miles

Total distance 2021:   471 miles

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