Pictures are in and around Bonifacio (South coast of Corsica).
Ok, no laughing, there really was a kinda, sorta plan, which involved going East in the Med, at least as far as Greece.
But, reality being non-negotiable, (even though I've never quite been able to accept that) it turns out that the Med is no place to be in the dead of winter in any kind of “pleasure” craft.
We now know that the surprise expressed by fellow sailors (upon hearing our plans to sail the Med in winter ) was really just a way to politely avoid openly calling us “fools”.
The tip off should have come in when, in our 1st Med port (where our mast had been delivered) we had a 5 day SE gale (atypical as the worst ones generally are the Mistrals that come down the Rhone valley from the North).
Since that time we've been so many gales that I've lost count.
The worst one generated 90 knot winds, we were on the West coast of Corsica and it came from the East, breaking up a marina on that coast and knocking out power to large parts of NE Corsica.
It was so bad in the marina we were in we could not climb from our boat onto the sea wall.
Leading through a series of misadventures that involved inflating the dinghy to give us a way to get 6 feet from the boat to the dock, towing the dinghy when we left there in a hurry, losing the dinghy (the rule is you never tow....this was the 1st time on the trip I did that) in a 50-70 knot storm we got trapped out in when it finally broke it's lines....it took us 3 hours to fight our way into a cove where we were trapped for 3 nights and 2 days...worst high sustained winds I've ever experienced....I don't even want to talk about it, which is why I'm just burying this in a paragraph I'm hopeful people don't read....
Proceeding down the coast of Corsica, which I admit was very beautiful and the 1st time I've ever sailed a boat and looked up at snow capped mountains (did I mention it was cold as hell???) , we experienced sleet and sailed within 2 miles of a huge waterspout, (read gigantic tornado!!!!) and watched as 4 more spouts came down from that cloud.
On the South coast of Corsica we stayed in Bonifacio, where the docks are at the narrow end of a long cut in the rocks.
The wind was blowing it's typical 25 knots (which it always does when it isn't blowing 50+) straight down the cut, docking required turning the boat up wind in a wide spot and then blowing down the cut bow to the wind, allowing me to land Armando on a pier from the bow with a bit of forward maneuvering.
Just trying to paint a picture here....the Aussie I met in Bonifacio commented that everyone in the Bahamas was avidly watching the weather trying to avoid anything above 18 knots, when we never see anything less than that and typically have days of 30-50 (he also thought that, had the Bahamas been hit with a sustained 90+ it would have made CNN, but the Corsican gale probably didn't make the news anywhere in Europe).
After Bonifacio we jumped down to Sardinia and traveled the East coast, providing protection from the inevitable Mistrals that circles counter clockwise and thus typically hit the West coast.
One night found us in a small “protected” spot (which we surfed into, not the way you want to enter a small cut) where the locals advised us to tie up to the largest fishing boat as that night's expected swell would make the visitors' dock totally untenable.
Which worked out well for us as there was no charge, the fisherman gave us glasses of homemade clear “brandy” and ensured that we would get an early start if the weather cleared, as they would fire up their engines and charge out at 4:00 am (which they and we did).
Anyway, back to The Plan Changes.....at some point going down the coast of Sardinia and contemplating the next logical Eastward jump (Sardinia to Sicily – 170nm) I started to do some (uncharacteristic) thinking and planning.
I had known I was short on time and had briefly broached the idea to Diane of coming home after the hurricane season, which would give me the 6 more months I needed to sail the Med, get to Brazil and home.
I don't recall exactly what Diane's response was, but it was something about my stuff and the driveway, so that idea was a non-starter.
The problem with going East (which was fairly easy as the Mistral turns to the East and will blow you as far as you want to go that way), is that you have to claw your way back West if your intention is to exit the Med at that end.
The Aussie in Bonifacio told me the cheapest place to buy sailboats was Turkey in the winter, as no one wanted to sail them back out!
Going to Sicily started to look like a bad idea. Even getting West (to the Balearic Islands off Spain) from Sardinia was going to take 2 days of “good” weather, of which we had not experienced in our time in this pond.
If we turned West and managed to get the Balearics, then a trip to Brazil could be envisioned, along with more time in warm places, swimming and the whole deal one envisions when thinking about sailing.
And, thus the new plan....Eastward Med sailing was abandoned, the new plan was to get as far West and South as fast as possible and Brazil was back in the picture!
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