The Siracusa Standby (Sicily)

When we last left off, our intrepid adventurers faced an uncertain fate.... It was the night before we were about to cross the Straits of Messina without a weather forecast. Both dog tired, we went to bed early after setting the kedge anchor. That turned out to be utterly ineffective, and we had one of the most uncomfortable nights so far, both being tossed back and forth across the bed as the boat rolled to and fro all night. At dawn after little if any sleep, glad at least to be off the bed, I jumped into the dark water, and with some effort managed to heave the kedge anchor up from the deep. We then raised the main anchor and set off in a South Westerly direction aiming for Siracusa on the South East of Sicily. It turned hot and hazy, the water was calm, the breeze was light, and the uncomfortable swell from the previous night had turned into a gentle rise and fall of the bow as we cut our way forward. The radio chatter has shifted from Greek to Italian. We heard a message repeated through the day, that at first I thought was a warning of a vessel taking on water. After hearing it repeated a few more times it turned out to be a warning of an aircraft taking up water - that explains the hazy sky, we assume the aircraft (helicopter?) is taking up water to put out a bush fire as it’s been stinking hot and without rain in this region for some weeks now. Another highlight of the journey was finally spotting a pod of dolphins. They didn’t come that close, and kept their own course a few hundred meters away from us - probably had dolphin business to attend to and couldn’t spend the day messing around under our bow. The last few days of cat napping and short overnight watches has taken its toll on us both, and we’re glad to be heading into a bay where we can relax for a few days. As we approached the entrance of the large town bay at Siracusa we hailed the harbour master on the VHF to check in. What followed was a stilted, staggered, confusion of half understood words, and lots of ‘standby’. After standing by for some hours (having dropped the anchor) I finally radioed them back to confirm the situation. The reply: “we wait for a doctor” ....not sure why that would be as we’re both fully vaccinated.. but at 7pm on a Saturday evening, I suspect we’ll be ‘standing by’ until Monday! Shortly after that frustrating realisation, the radio crackled once more... ‘Serenity? Serenity?’ I excitedly grabbed the handset... that must be the doctor! It turned out to be a friendly Swedish boat who were in the same situation as us, and had heard our chatter. They invited us over to use their wifi - which is great as we can at least let people know we’ve made it here safely (our wifi still not working). They mentioned that they’d been here for two days and were running short of water, so armed with a bottle of red and 40 litres of water we rowed over and spent a pleasant hour with Janni, Petra, Toby and Eva bemoaning our shared situation and swapping sailing stories.