Slamming the Door on the Med Season

"The season is pretty short here in the Med, and, like the Wanderer told us, once the wind patterns change, the season can end very quickly," write Greg Dorland and Debbie Macrorie of the Lake Tahoe-based Catana 52 cat Escapade.

"One look at the accompanying weather map shows how bad it’s gotten. Not only is there a big low over Corsica, the wind is out of the south at the Balearics to the west and the Adriatic in the east. And what you probably can’t see from the graphic is that there are very strong winds sweeping across the Aegean from the northeast that make a 270° turn at the southern tip of the Peloponnesus before heading northwest toward Sicily. You can just imagine how confused the seas must be in some parts of the Med."

"Debbie and I spent the night aboard Escapade in Genoa, Italy, where we had a wild night of lightning. Since our carbon fiber mast has already been hit by lightning twice, we didn’t want a third strike."

"It turns out that the mast needs to be pulled anyway to do a small repair to the ball and socket that it sits on. I think the Delrin bearing has degraded after all the ocean miles. Our friend is the owner of Licospars in Lago di Garda, and we’re glad that he’s agreed to come down to Genoa to oversee the work.

"We’d almost gone down to Ragusa in southern Sicily. It would have been nice, but we decided it was more important to get the work done on the mast, which is what brought us back up north to Genoa. Debbie and I will spend the winter in the Dolomite Mountains, probably in Cortina."

For those keeping score, Corsica is at about the same latitude as Oregon.