CRUISING THE MEDITERRANEAN CAN BE BUMPY

by Jim Toomey

AS WE SAILED SOUTHEAST ALONG THE Italian coast, the sky grew more overcast, the headwinds stronger, the waves taller and the water shallower. This last trend, the shallowing water, was the most worrisome. If water is shallow enough and swells are big enough, waves roll over and break. Sailing in breaking waves is an entirely different exercise from sailing in sea swells. When swells roll across the open sea, their energy is oriented up and down. Steering a sailboat through big swells can be like slalom skiing. It can even be fun. However, when a wave breaks, its energy is redirected into a lateral force that pushes boats around like toys. The ski slope turns into a minefield. In daylight, it’s stressful; at night, it’s terrifying.

By midday, our progress had slowed to a crawl. We turned on the second en- gine in hopes that we could still make Rome before sunset. The wind was now 20 knots in our face, the seas were 10 feet, the skies were a solid gray, and the water had shallowed to 30 feet. We instructed the kids to stay in their cabins to minimize their chances of getting hurt, or worse, falling overboard. Madeleine simply transported her project —kirigami, drawing, homeschooling—to her cabin. William, on the other hand, was immobilized by rough seas and would lie on his bed with a bowl by his side. Staying inside maximized both their chances of getting seasick, but we preferred cleaning up that mess to setting a broken arm. In the stress of managing a sailboat in a storm, the last thing we needed was an injury. Catastrophes are frequently the end result of a series of cascading problems: the weather deteriorates, the ship is not battened down, a crewmember gets hurt, another crewmember assists—leaving less crew for boat management—the skipper is multitasking, and suddenly the boat runs aground. In heavy weather sailing, it’s critical to recognize the start of a cascade and shut it down immediately.

I peeked at the cruising guide for Italy and saw that sunset was at 8:06 p.m. It was four in the afternoon, so we had four more hours to cover 18 nautical miles before darkness set in. Progressing at four knots, we would get to Rome at dusk, on a low tide, making the shallower water at the harbor entrance more likely to produce large, possibly breaking waves.

Rome’s ancient port off the Tiber River, Ostia Antica, where her mighty navy took shelter from the same kind of Mediterranean storms we faced tonight, was silted in centuries ago. The modern Porto Turistico di Roma was built in 2001 next to the mouth of the Tiber. Consisting of a semicircle of boulders enclosing a basin with room for 800 boats, the new marina was dropped directly on the beach, just an arrow shot from the ancient port. Arriving vessels enter through a 100-foot-wide opening in the breakwater.

At about six o’clock, the harbor entrance appeared off our port bow. The depth sounder read just 25 feet, and the swells around us were collapsing into piles of white foam. We worried that the water was already too shallow and dared not get any closer. The winds had now backed around to the west, blowing straight onto shore and hurling big waves onto the breakwater. We hailed the harbormaster on the radio and heard nothing but static, so we inched closer for better reception. I grabbed the binoculars, drew a bead on the entrance of the port, and what I saw made my stomach sink. All around the breakwater, white explosions shot 30 feet into the sky before being quickly carried away by the wind.

After a few more tries on the radio, the harbormaster finally answered our call. In broken English, he told us the port was closed and gave us peremptory instructions to stay away from the harbor entrance. Once again, we were caught in a decaying situation—sun setting, wind strengthening, seas building—with no Plan B. We had only one direction to run, north, away from the storm, so we frantically studied the chart, hoping to see an alternate port somewhere, anywhere. Five, ten, fifteen miles, and still the chart revealed nothing. We finally saw Santa Marinella, our only alternative, 26 miles away. At five knots, it would take us five more hours if all went well, and things were not going well.

We turned north, putting the wind and waves directly on our beam. The waves smashed into our port side as if we were a seawall, rolling us and pushing us sideways. From the flybridge, behind the protection of clear plastic and canvas, I scanned the darkness and worried about rogue waves lurking in the distance. How far would we roll over if one hit us? With capsizing on my mind, I called the kids out of their cabins and up onto the bridge deck. I was breaking our golden rule about keeping them inside during night passages, but I was more concerned about how we might reach them in their cabins if a large wave were to flip the boat. We intentionally did not clip our safety harnesses into the jack lines because being clipped onto the deck is also a problem if the boat turns turtle and the top becomes the bottom.

With the right combination of sail, wind, and waves, nearly any sailboat can get knocked down. As a boy sailing a Hobie Cat on the Chesapeake Bay, capsizing was an everyday event. Before we settled on buying a big catamaran, I read everything I could about their chances of capsizing. With high performance catamarans like those in the America’s Cup, or even some high-end recreational catamarans, capsizing is possible if the helmsman is not careful. With recreational cats like ours, the rig is not strong enough to flip the boat over on its side under sail. The boat is too heavy, and the mast and rigging would simply break. Large side waves generally will not capsize a recreational cat because the keels are shallow, and the boat will slip sideways rather than dig into the water and flip over the way a high-performance catamaran with deep keels might. That night off Rome, motoring with no sails up, we knew the chances of capsizing were remote, but with every wave that slammed into our hull, the possibility still terrified us.

In the dark, raging seascape I could make out much larger waves rising up and breaking into mountains of white foam. I said to Valerie, “If one of those waves breaks over us, we’re screwed.” As the words left my mouth, a wall of water emerged from the darkness and crashed over the boat, burying the forward deck in white foam and green water. Sacre Bleu rolled slightly to starboard and slipped sideways with a shudder. It was at that moment, oddly enough, that I stopped worrying. Neptune had given us everything he had, and all he got from us was a little roll. Although we were going to be spending another damp, windy, cold night at the helm, I took comfort in knowing that we were going to make it.

The rest of the rollercoaster ride up the coast was stressful but manageable. All through the storm, up on the flybridge, the kids were quiet as a picture. They had not seen mom and dad quite so anxious before, and they were feeling it themselves.

We reached the shelter of the port of Santa Marinella, at the foot of imposing Castello Odescalchi di Santa Marinella, at midnight and tucked in among a mix of small fishing and recreational boats. Unlike most of our ports of call, Santa Marinella had no mega-yachts, or many yachts at all. Designed to accommodate workboats coming and going in all weather conditions, it was a haven on this night because its breakwater was oriented in such a way that entering vessels could find protection behind a large seawall before the trickier part of negotiating the port’s narrow entry.

Wet, cold and exhausted, we were too worked up to go to sleep right away. Feeling like we had just walked away from a plane crash, Valerie and I stayed up a while longer talking about what we had just experienced. Too tired to take her raincoat off, hair in a tangle, Valerie settled into the settee and admitted that there were moments when she was scared. If she was, she didn’t show it. Despite the fear and frustrations of our long day, we retired that night better sailors, and, in a strange way, that made it one of the best days of the cruise. We had been tested by conditions that were far more challenging than any we had encountered before, but our five months of cruising had prepared us. We were on a learning curve that was steep enough to be challenging, but not so steep that we were going to fall off.

Author and noted cartoonist, Jim Toomey, with his wife Valerie and their two children, took a long sabbatical aboard Sacre Bleu and chronicled their adventures in the book Family Afloat. The book is available on Amazon Prime here.

You can read more about the Toomey’s cruising adventures here.

Jim Toomey is an internationally published humor writer and syndicated cartoonist best known as the creator of the popular comic strip Sherman’s Lagoon, published daily in over 150 newspapers, including The Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune.

Valerie Toomey moved to the U.S. from her native France twenty-five years ago. Since then, she has worked in international shipping, run a children’s boutique, and for the past ten years worked in the boating industry, currently as a yacht broker for Atlantic Cruising Yachts.