Decision made - sailing on to Brindisi

Brindisi coastline

We reached Otranto around midnight as expected.  What was not expected was the vast amount of ship traffic in the region.  There were huge cargo ships all around and it was a very dark night.  The more we thought about crossing the shipping lanes at night and going into an unknown port to drop anchor the more reasonable it seemed to just keep going.  It was another 40 nm to Brindisi so we thought we would likely be arriving after the sun was up.  If it looked like we would arrive too early we could just slow down a bit.  So the decision was made, we would sail on to Brindisi.

Marina di Brindisi

Once we decided to keep going we knew we had to get away from all those big ships.  We decided to sail closer to the coast (within 3 to 5 miles) which would put us out of the shipping lanes.  What a relief it was to finally get away from those ships!  At last we were able to get tad bit of sleep. Our decision to carry on ended up being a really good decision as the wind decided to turn north early.  The swell got rough as the wind picked up to 18 knots on the nose!  Consequently our speed dropped way off and we were barely making any headway.  At one point we were barely making 3 knots - a crawl.  No worries that we would get in too early now😒.  

 

Fishing off the sea wall - Brindisi

 

 

After a couple of hours the swell calmed down and our speed improved.  We were still making only 4.5 knots but better speed than earlier.  All night there was lightening all around but never a drop of rain.  We were hoping it would hold off until we were docked.  As it turned out we reached the Marina at 1000 Greek time and 0900 Italian time.  As we were docking it did finally start to rain but at least we weren't sailing all night in the rain😄.  We really wanted to sleep the day away but a nap was the best we could manage.  There are always a lot of formalities when you arrive in a new country that must be attended to no matter how tired you are.  We were so glad that we made the decision to carry on as the next day was rough.  High winds and rain.  Not only was it like that the next day but it remained rainy, cool and very, very windy for the next two weeks.  As a matter of fact after a week of that we said to heck with it.  After securing the boat well we rented an apartment for the weekend and just settled back to enjoy the stillness.  But now the sun is shining every day and its 70 degrees outside.  Pretty perfect!