Sails alone | BITE

Diego comes aboard with only a few hours' notice, we sail out chased by lightning from a storm, and when the engine dies a few miles from Roccella Jonica, only the sails are left to bring us in.

A few hours after Nepo and Joseph left for the airport, someone else came aboard Spritz.

His name is Diego. He's from Brescia, and until the day before we didn't even know him. He'd messaged us out of the blue, asking if there was room for him on the legs ahead. Within a few hours he'd already booked a ticket to Crotone. The next day he was standing in front of us, backpack on his shoulder.

There wasn't much time for ceremony. A quick rundown of the boat, the essentials, and before sunset we were already out of the harbour, heading for Reggio Calabria.

The storm behind us

The forecast promised little wind and a quiet passage, mostly under engine. We could have waited until morning and left at leisure. We didn't.

Behind us, over Puglia, the storm we'd been racing since Bari was finally breaking. We could see it in the distance, in flashes lighting up the horizon. Leaving right away meant keeping that distance. Waiting meant risking it catching up with us.

So we left.

A better night than expected

For once, the forecast was wrong in our favour. During the night we found far more wind than we'd planned for, and Spritz sailed fast, straight south, with Diego learning to hold a heading in the dark while the rest of us traded off at the helm.

Then, come morning, the wind died. And so did the engine.

A knot and a half

No loud bang, no smoke, no alarm. The engine simply stopped answering. We found ourselves nearly stationary: a few hours adrift, unable to make more than a knot and a half, with the Calabrian coast sitting right there, visible and unreachable.

Eventually a puff of wind showed up. Not much, but enough to carry us into Roccella Jonica, where we came in on the evening of Sunday, September 20th, greeted by fireworks lighting up the sky over the bay.

Sails alone

This part deserves more than a line.

Coming into an unfamiliar harbour, at night, with no engine, isn't just another moment. It's exactly the kind of situation where everything we've written about in the safety series stops being theory and becomes the only thing that matters.

Sami, Diego and I split the tasks as if we'd rehearsed it a hundred times, even though we hadn't: who worked the sails, who called out depth, who tracked our distance from the other moored boats. No raised voices, no confusion, just the sequence of calls and confirmations that turns a manoeuvre like this into something manageable instead of dangerous.

We anchored using nothing but the wind. It went off without a hitch.

The fireworks, we found out later, weren't for us. We liked the coincidence anyway.

A bill still due

We enjoyed that night at Roccella Jonica with the satisfaction of people who'd just pulled off something harder than expected. But a problem was still sitting there, exactly the size of an engine that wouldn't start: we needed to figure out what had happened, and fix it before the real bad weather caught up with us.

That's the next article.