Thursday 1st May

Another bright sunny (but cold and blustery) day as we sailed west across the Mediterranean heading for the narrow Straits of Messina between Sicily and the toe of Italy. We watched another great talk from Paul Roberts about Pompeii and Herculaneum, it really is fascinating watching him pull all the relevant facts out of the mass of information available saying things “like remember this for later” and “you will see the importance of this later” and then start to put together a coherent tableau of life as it was then, saying remember X and this is why Z was so important and slowly the picture emerges like mist clearing from a valley.

Oh and ‘so sad’ Carol took the first suitcase out to start packing all the things that we won’t need before the end of the voyage. I put the SIM card back in the mobile in readiness for contact with the real world and didn’t get a signal for an hour or so. Anyway we took the Messina pilot on board at about 8:00pm before sailing through this tiny gap and after disembarking him we headed North on our way to Naples through the Tyrrhenian Sea. Went to dinner and then the show as the clocks go back again tonight so we get another hour in bed.