Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Writer and filmmaker Sal + photographer Mark have a five year plan to sail their Swan 47 MATILDA from Palma, Spain back to Sydney Australia. This weekly podcast shares the wonder and realities of living your dream while maintaining careers and a 50 year old boat.
We are recording. We're recording?
Sal:You concentrating? You're ready to go?
Mark:Yep. I'm ready. It
Sal:is Saturday, June 27. Welcome back to MATILDA RADIO.
Mark:Just Podcast number three?
Sal:Podcast number three. I don't
Mark:like the word podcast. Can we think of something better?
Sal:Poddy. I that.
Mark:That's even worse. That's terrible. No. No. No.
Mark:Our That's conversation number three.
Sal:Conversation number three. I don't know. Does that have a good ring to it?
Mark:Yes. It does.
Sal:Chat number 3. Chat 3.
Mark:Oh.
Sal:It's chat 3. Conversation number 3.
Mark:Okay.
Sal:Conversation number 3 coming to you live from?
Mark:Trapani on the Western corner of West Northwestern corner of Sicily.
Sal:Of Sicily. I do wish to acknowledge that the blue boys have just demolished the West Coast, and I was so excited to wake up at 05:15
Mark:Can I also point out for the first, I don't know what it was, probably 12 rounds of the season, Sail had absolutely no interest in football?
Sal:So We all didn't.
Mark:It's only the last it's only the last six matches that you're facing. So talk about being on the bandwagon or
Sal:off the bandwagon. No. No. No. Absolutely.
Sal:We live in Carlton. That is absolutely unfair. I don't know what was going on with that club. Sorry, Michael Voss, but bye bye, Michael Voss. And and it's just wonderful to see those to see those blue boys.
Sal:Big shout out to my dad who would have really enjoyed that game. Bone of contention. Let's move on. Yeah. Done.
Sal:Last week was unofficially sponsored by NAVALI, this week, MATILDA RADIO is coming to you brought to you by the, unofficial sponsor, Car Car Framo? Carremo? Carremo Modelo, Boro. They are the makers of the great world's greatest fans, of which we have five. Talk us through the installation of said fan mark.
Mark:Well, the thing is the interior of MATILDA is very original. So it's I think if you think mid seventies design, sort of scandy mid seventies design, lots of timber, and it looks like a bit like a sort of cross between a a sauna and a sort of mountain lodge inside. And so I'm very reluctant to put anything in it that sort of that that destroys the vibe of it. But Sail decided before we left Valencia that we needed fans, and we ordered these five quite expensive 12 volt Italian fans.
Sal:I'm about to break your heart. I just look they are extraordinarily we paid well, they're a €160 each.
Mark:Yeah. They're just little plastic fans, but they are good.
Sal:They're on sale at the moment, Mark, so we could get five more. They're a €130 each, but I think we might have even got a special price for a special friend from Special Peter. But, you did mention the word. The word is sauna. Are you allowed to swear on this show?
Mark:No. No. No need. There's no need.
Sal:Well, it has been very hot. But I think the thing about it is, last year, when we first moved on to Matilda in August last year, we had five days of 45 in a row. And that was, you know and I was actually looking the the the variables are so are so scant. Even last night, 24 degrees. It's saying it's only 28 degrees.
Mark:Yeah. But it's the humidity today.
Sal:It's It's humidity.
Mark:Yeah. If you got a beer out the fridge, it's dripping with perspiration within about thirty seconds. Yeah. But I reckon at the moment
Sal:There is no beer in the fridge at the moment, Justin.
Mark:I know. I know. Yeah. Sorry. Can you let me finish?
Sal:Yeah. Go.
Mark:Okay. I reckon at the moment that if you're on anchor Sorry about beer. Thing. So sorry. What was that?
Sal:I was just worried about your beer consumption. Back. If you were on anchor.
Mark:Yeah. But are you gonna interrupt me again? Uh-uh. Okay. If you're on anchor, so you're pointing into the wind and we have our wind scoop up, which is amazing.
Mark:It comes out of the four hatchets, so it fastens in the four corners of the four hatch, and then we put it on the inner four stay halyard and pull up. And it's shaped to to sort of guide the wind down into the fore peak and through the boat. So if you have that on, and we've got our fans above each bed and above Sail's desk, and we have our awnings up. It's pretty bloody good. Okay.
Mark:You know, you don't wanna be jumping around doing a whole lot and running the oven, but it's fine.
Sal:Yesterday was a seven swim day.
Mark:And so, you know, we cope with the heat. It's only June. It's gonna get hotter.
Sal:Yeah. It's gonna get hotter as we, head to Greece where we know there is no wind. So we really do need to reflect on possibly the greatest sail, greatest passage. I mean, we we had very little wind, but boy, it was a beautiful sail from Sardinia to Sicily. We had to rip ourselves away.
Sal:We were very patient waiting for wind in Torre Dol Dostella. And, yeah, we we we really did give ourselves the sort of best opportunity to to sail.
Mark:Yeah. So with although those of you who read SWS know that I sort of rant against technology becoming too prevalent in sailing, the the PredictWind app is pretty bloody wonderful, especially working out your departure time. You can run a whole lot of models about the route that you're planning to take with, you know, anything between sort of one hour and one day intervals. You can run four days departure and find out how much of the time you'll be motoring, how much will be upwind, how much will be downwind. And running that like we're trying to reduce the amount of time we're motoring.
Mark:And we worked out probably the best time to leave was about 03:30 in the morning, which we did from from Sardinia, and the passage time was, at that stage, predicted to be one day and four hours.
Sal:But just on that, on reflection, how many hours did we end up sailing?
Mark:We ended up sailing for seven out of the 26. So we did nineteen hours, mate.
Sal:More than that. Yeah.
Mark:It was a hell of a of it. Was motor sailing. So we'd have we'd have the the head sail and the main up and just having the engine ticking over pushing us along. One thing I did sort of remark on to myself was that often when you're doing passage planning, you're thinking, oh, I want the wind to be, you know, I I need to be either reaching or running to make it a comfortable passage. When it's light, especially here in the mid when it's light, if you can plan a passage that's an upwind passage, it's so much more enjoyable.
Mark:And especially in a boat like this, which just loves going upwind. But having your apparent increase and having a bit more actual air going over the deck makes the trip so much more pleasant, you know, assuming you haven't got 20 knots going over the deck. But, you know, if you've got if you've if you if you're going along a boat like this can do in seven knots of breeze of true wind, hard on the wind, we're doing five and a beat. Yeah. So, you know, then suddenly your parents up over 10, and then it's actually quite pleasant on deck.
Mark:Planning a trip, you don't want downwind work if it's light. You really wanna be going into the wind and Yeah.
Sal:You know what Downwind in those light in the in
Mark:the It's just motoring.
Sal:You're motoring, but you're also sloppy. We had a very we had beautiful sea state. Superb. Yeah. Absolutely beautiful.
Mark:And what were the highlights for you of the trip?
Sal:The highlights for me well, I mean, I love T shirt sailing. And I think that that's for me the thing about the you know, it's hard in Melbourne. Look look you know, it's the winter series at the moment. And doing the winter series, I'm somebody who gets very, very, very cold. You know, I'm doing the winter series in seven or eight layers.
Sal:We need to talk about that clock in a moment too. But to be sailing on deck, you know, basically, you come off watch, I go on watch, you have your little rituals like I've always I I I do in the middle of the night. I really love listening to books. You tend to not listen to anything. I I listen to books.
Sal:I make a cup of
Mark:I listen to the world around me.
Sal:Oh, yes. You you listen to the conversation of the world around you. I don't. I have I actually had an absolutely crazy book pouring into my head, which could not have been more juxtaposed to the what I was experiencing. A book called Yesteryear.
Sal:I'll, talk about that, in when I'm when I've finished that book, but it's about trad wives, Mark. Topic you might not have you definitely do not have any any lived experience of a trad wife, so I'll have to explain that to you. But, no. So get my headphones, make a cup of tea, you know, if you're hungry, have a bit of a snack, a bit of chocolate, go up on deck. But what was what I was really mindful of was sitting I sat on the the yoga platform, the yoga deck in the middle of the boat, which I was sort of surprised about.
Sal:It gave me a lot better visibility. And it was really I
Mark:think when Yeah. Olin Stevenson, Scott Kaufman designed this boat, I don't think they envisaged it as a yoga deck.
Sal:More is the pity. Yoga was around then.
Mark:I think the yoga deck was not something. I'll have to send that to Scott and see what he says.
Sal:He'd be he'd be proud of it.
Mark:I know you use it as a yoga deck every morning, but really, I don't think that's what it's meant for.
Sal:I had a beautiful yoga session this morning. I had a
Mark:We have to sound topic. So we're talking about the highlights of the trip.
Sal:The highlights of for me was sitting on on the platform, with, you know, three sixty degree view of of the ocean and trying to sort of work out the Milky Way the other night was incredible. Absolutely incredible. And then the lights, you know, you you have absolutely no lights, and then you're staring at the horizon, and suddenly there were I was ringed by lights, seven lights, seven boats. And it was really interesting actually when you came up on deck and you were on Navionics and able to toggle between a map and the underwater, what do you call them, contours. And we we could see that we were pretty much sailing over what would have once been an extraordinary mountain range and
Mark:so it's a range of volcanoes.
Sal:Oh, how cool.
Mark:I'll post a picture of it with the with the podcast. I'm looking for a name of it. Extraordinary.
Sal:Yeah. So this valley of volcanoes and over which all the fishing boats were were trawling and sitting. And so, I mean, they you had to sort of keep your wits about you to sort of look where they were going. They were huge, great big huge boats. And then you sailed through that area and they were gone.
Sal:They were behind you and you were back to so it was really it was so funny to come across that sort of that moment of industry and what what you sort of feel is is a really, big space. And then and then, of course, you know, boats coming back and forwards the other way going. It's it's it's a bit of a yachts. Yeah. It's a bit of a highway between what were your highlights?
Mark:I think that, you you know, the few hours we had sailing were pretty special because it was flat water and, you know, and the boat loves that upwind light upwind work and heavy upwind work. And I think both the departure because I you stayed off watch when I left and just sort of gently motoring up down the side of down the the Southeast Corner of Sardinia and then heading out across the on the passage sort of just in the silence was beautiful. And then also, we didn't actually come right to Sicily. We stopped about 20 miles short of the Sicily Mainland, would you call it? Well, it's not really mainland.
Mark:Again, we stopped on an island, off an island, off Italy called Maratimo, which is
Sal:Oh, so
Mark:beautiful. A beautiful lump of rock. Oh my god. And we stopped on the on the south of that in a little bay that really is so dramatic. Just these huge slabs of rock falling into the water, and we anchored there at about five in the morning just as the sun just as the light was getting into the sky.
Mark:That was pretty special.
Sal:That was very special. Beautiful swimming there. Bit of sadness with the amount of plastic on that beach. That was Yeah.
Mark:I mean, the water's amazingly clear, and the fish are just incredible. But any beach, you know, any remote beach that you go up onto, there's a lot of I don't it seems like it's a lot of it is fishing waste rather than consumer waste, but maybe the consumer waste has broken down. Yeah. I mean, it's not so much drink bottles. It's things like lines and floods and and polystyrene and
Sal:Yeah. Polystyrene.
Mark:It's out of control. We're not talking like barley or something, but, you know, it's everywhere. So Yeah. You know, it's something that we have to keep working on. And And something you know, picking it up is one thing, but it's not really a solution.
Mark:Preventing it is really the only solution.
Sal:Yeah. Well, we've just got to I mean, it's it's having a conversation like this, isn't it, on a podcast that
Mark:Yeah. Well, what's that gonna do? I don't know.
Sal:I don't know. We're preaching to the converted. But I what was I mean, one of my favorite things is to arrive somewhere in the dark and to and to wake up to that new place of it just felt like a magic carpet. It really felt like a magic carpet flying across that ocean and then waking up the next day. So we got in and we'd had a lot of a lot of broken sleep, both pretty tired.
Sal:And then what was extraordinary for me was flipping on Elong. And
Mark:Elong is us, what we call Starlink.
Sal:Yeah. Flipping yeah. Flipping on Starlink. And, and having that extraordinary session with Icedocco. So Icedocco is, a a lab, a a documentary.
Sal:I'm a documentary filmmaker. And, last year, I started this lab. I wanna create a a community of international filmmakers. And I've got unusual approach to making documentaries. I approach documentaries very strictly from this from this from the idea of story as opposed to many filmmakers approach it from the idea of sort of archive and then letting the story find itself.
Sal:So it's kind of I would I'd call it a slightly radical approach. But, we've got this lab and we get together and, once a month. But applications are open, Mark, for the for the next lab.
Mark:So it sounds amazing when the bits that I hear sound really good. Yeah. Sound really good. So if if you're interested in making a documentary
Sal:Or know anybody who's interested.
Mark:Anybody who's put them in touch because you get to the possibility of winning $20,000 to make your documentary, and it's free apart from a small application fee.
Sal:Yeah. Yeah. And we're looking for a filmmaker. I mean, what was incredible the other day was here we were in tiny little bay, Maritimo, put the anchor down, check on you know, switch on Starlink, go on to my Zoom call. I've got Jess in China.
Sal:I've got Seb in Chile in Santiago. We've got MATILDA in Colombia, filmmakers in Australia, Indonesia. I mean, how incredible is that? And and for for us to be to maintain those kind of connections with our work whilst we're doing those overnight passages, it's a huge sense of accomplishment, isn't it? I I mean, I
Mark:We're very lucky that we live in times that can do it. I mean, we both we did some work for the Classic Yacht Association this week as well Yeah. Which is really cool because they're producing a register of their boats. Yeah. And you did the design for it, and I'll do the sort of input and the words and and things around it.
Mark:And we can do that here from Italy just as well as we can from Carlton or Princess Hill. There's perhaps been no reason.
Sal:Absolutely. I'm working with my publishers on my book that's coming out next May, you know, with
Mark:So we're guess that leads to something that sort of I addressed very briefly in the in my little sort of editorial thing that went out with SWS on Friday was that part of the reason we came on this trip is because we wanted to sort of, like, disconnect from a lot of the white noise of daily life of the the chatter in your ear and the radio going off and conspiracy theorists and, you know, just basically all the junk that fills your life, like real estate prices and what the kids are doing and this and that. And so you want to sort of disconnect. But then if you you don't want to disconnect so far that you become irrelevant or that you, you know, you don't feel like you're in touch with the world at large. So sort of balancing the idea of getting away from it and yet not getting away from it too far, I think, is is one thing that we sort of not struggling with, but we're working on, I reckon.
Sal:Yeah. I know for myself because I love drawing, and I noticed that, you know, I've I've got my beautiful watercolors and beautiful paint set and drawing and stuff there. How you know, it's seldom that I'm pulling it out. It's maybe and and for me, that's a big marker of how clear my mind is. I I do feel incredibly
Mark:What do you That you've you've got a clear mind when you're doing the paint when you get a chance to do the painting?
Sal:Yeah. Yeah. That's sort of a sign when I've disconnected. That's when I'm like, you know but, I like it, Mark. I like being able to live here, and I like being able to be connected.
Sal:I like that we can
Mark:Oh, yeah. Yeah. No. I'm not saying that that was wasn't my point that we're doing it too much, but just having that balance because, you know, you can be so connected to all your documentary things and your writing and your da da da that you don't see the town that you're anchored in.
Sal:Yeah. Yeah.
Mark:Yeah. You know, we should probably walk around Trapani where we are now where have we said where we are?
Sal:Let's come back to where we are.
Mark:Well, we're actually this podcast is flying along because we're sort of two thirds of the way through it. So we better
Sal:That's right.
Mark:We are well, this is a a good place, Trapani, because or it's a good place for a lot of reasons, but one of the really cool things about it is one of the rare places in the Med where there's a a nice harbor where they let you anchor in the harbor. Most places, no anchoring, stairway, get outside, or pay an absolute fortune for a marina fee. But here, you can anchor in the harbor, and it's very protected. And, you know, you could go swimming in the harbor if you wanted. Probably we won't because there's nicer places to go swimming.
Mark:But how cool is that? And then we take the dinging ashore couple of 100 meters away Yeah. And walk into town. We'll do our washing and change the gas on the deserving and go to the supermarket and Get used
Sal:to shoes in Decathlon?
Mark:Yeah. I need new shoes, mate. Crocs that I bought a year ago in
Sal:In Bonifacio.
Mark:Bonifacio worn through now. So when I walk, I'm walking on the road.
Sal:I mean, I think one of the things we always struggle with is this the sense of being a tourist and the sense of being belonging and the sense of and I think
Mark:But you're never really gonna belong when you're visiting on a boat, are
Sal:You're not. You're not. Of course, you're not.
Mark:But I suppose that's why we spend the winter in Valencia or
Sal:Yeah. That's right. It does give you a bit a bit of a a in fact, I've just lost over a point that I really wanted to make, which is about anchoring, because something that I'm always thinking about, like, every place that we're going into around here, you know, it starts with the Phoenicians and then the Carthagens and then the the, you know, the Greeks and then the Romans and then the Normans, and there's this kind of incredible lineage lineage. And I'm just thinking about all the stuff those guys have put into the ocean. And so when we're putting our anchor down, particularly somewhere like this, you know, I'm I'm and I love our Rocna anchor.
Sal:Our anchor is superb. It is
Mark:Do you think we could get sponsorship from Rocna?
Sal:We they will they're it's interesting you should say that, Mark. They're actually the sponsors of next week, so I'm giving them a bit of a preplug.
Mark:They're a Kiwi company, I think.
Sal:Are they?
Mark:I think it's invented by a Kiwi guy. I mean, look, this is the sort of the
Sal:thing that we get that the thing that we get our rocks off on our Rockne anchor is
Mark:Rockne, spelled R 0 C N A.
Sal:R 0 C N A. What a beautiful piece of engineering. And we've both been absolutely delighted because the water is so extraordinarily clear in dropping it and then watching as the boat reverses how it actually pulls into the sand. How it
Mark:Flips over off its back, rolls over, and then buries itself into the
Sal:sand. Incredible.
Mark:I actually when dived over and had a look at it when you reversed so that I could see it, and it was just the most beautiful thing watching it just slowly edge its way into the sand.
Sal:It has a personality, our anchor. And, Rachner, if you're listening on and obviously, you'll be in touch next week because you're our sponsor. I would really imagine if they as part of their sort of the design, they kind of used laser or something to cut the metal, to cut little eyes into it because it does look like a it looks like a sort of a a beak or, you know, it reminds me of the of the masks that people had to use wear during plague sixteen sixty six, I believe that was, or, you know, one of those one of those old dates. But I am mindful that we're gonna have to pull this anchor up. And so yesterday, you attached something to it that, you know, gives us a bit of a chance if it does get snagged.
Mark:Yeah. So it's got a big roll bar over the top of it too, which helps it flip the right way up. And if we're anchoring anywhere where there's sort of craggy rocks or in a harbor where there might be chains on the bottom or whatever Yeah. It's a good idea just to tie a line around that roll bar and put a float on top so that if it does get stuck, you can sort of pull it out backwards.
Sal:Yeah. Yeah.
Mark:So you can pull it out.
Sal:Chance of a
Mark:different Instead of pulling it in, you're pulling it out. Yep.
Sal:Have we ever had to do that?
Mark:Yeah. We have. Actually, we should have had done it in back in
Sal:Last year?
Mark:No. No. No. Earlier this year when we were in not Cala Forte. What was the place on the on the Western End of Menorca?
Sal:Portopino.
Mark:No. Anyway, I can't remember, but, yeah, got we it stuck under a rock, we had to drive around in different circles trying to get
Sal:it out. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So William Trapnell, we're going to put great great request from long term long time listener Amanda, my cousin Amanda.
Mark:Long time. We've only been going two weeks.
Sal:She's been there for the long haul, Mark. She's there from the beginning, from day one. Her request was for a for a map of where we are so that she can, follow us and book said holidays or buy a house, Amanda. There was an absolutely fantastic house in Torre Del Dalsdella that was for sale last week that we all should chip in and buy. But tomorrow, Sam and Jim arrive.
Sal:Our first our first guests for the season
Mark:Well, not really because Belinda and Miles will be disappointed.
Sal:I'm sorry, Belinda and Miles. Well, Belinda and Miles are kind of no. No. Sam, I'm gonna dig myself into a whole heap
Mark:of those. Anyway, we've got guests to arrive.
Sal:You're all family. But, tomorrow, Sam and Jim arrive. First guest for June. There we go. Got myself out of that pickle.
Sal:And we we were thinking about going north, but this morning, Mark, you've put forward a very interesting argument for going south.
Mark:Well, not really. Going up a lot we're not going we're going east either way. It's just whether we go east along the North Coast or the South Coast Of Sicily. And Yeah. It seems to me though Well, that's the of the the standard answer would be to go on the North Coast because you've got Palermo, and then you could cross over to the Aeolian Islands and through the Straits Of Messina, and it's sort of a little bit more mainstream.
Mark:But I think there's a good argument for going on the South Coast, especially seeing us on Wednesday and Thursday, we've got a bit of a it's probably not called a Mistral down here, but it is the same sort of wind. It's coming northwest out of the Gulf Of Lyon. So that's coming through on Wednesday, Thursday. And so I think the South Coast could be nice, and it also gives us a chance to visit a place that I once went to when I made that book with Guy Grassy
Sal:called Agostino?
Mark:No. Argentino? No. What's it called?
Sal:We'll we'll talk about it next week.
Mark:No. We should get the name right. Just stand by. I'll tell you exactly what it's called. Look.
Mark:We're we're Agregento.
Sal:Agregento. We're going to Agrigento, which once again
Mark:Which is in the middle of the South Coast.
Sal:Yep.
Mark:And we'll probably go into a marina there if it blows for a couple of days because it's a good chance to explore the Roman ruins. Yep. And it looks like a pretty town.
Sal:Extraordinary town. I'm really looking forward to that.
Mark:And then we'll continue on to the Southeast Corner of Sicily and round the corner a little bit up to Syracuse, Syracuse. That coast looks really fun because there's lots of nooks and crannies and places you can hide. The South Coast is quite exposed and barren but
Sal:So lots of nooks and crannies ahead. Lots of blue blue, blue water ahead. Something I wanted to sort of just touch on, Mark, was Ian McKeown's book that I'm deep in and reading and Lex and Katrina who are visiting us in, August have also read it. That means you're gonna have to dive in and read it because something we're going to do is the immortal Immortal Dinner, which is spoken about in this book, but The Immortal Dinner took place in 1817. We are going to reenact The Immortal Dinner in Greece to discuss that book because it's doing my head in.
Sal:It's a pretty scary
Mark:What's The Immortal dinner?
Sal:Well, you'll you'll find out. The immortal dinner was
Mark:meeting of grace. For the listeners
Sal:if you don't say. Oh, it is.
Mark:It is.
Sal:It was a a legendary gathering of romantic era literary giants hosted by eccentric painter Benjamin Robert Hayden in his London studio on 12/28/1870. And
Mark:this So do we have to go to London to do this? No. God, no. God, no. We just do it on board.
Sal:No. No. No. We'll go to the Rose Garden Taverna and drink Rett Sina. But well, I'm getting ahead of my we might have to revisit Retsina maybe or Metaxa.
Sal:We'll go five star. We when we could never afford five star thirty years ago, so we'll we'll upgrade. We'll upgrade.
Mark:But So you should make so Metaxa comes in one, three, and five star. One star just comes in sort of gallon drums.
Sal:Gallon drums.
Mark:The three star came in bottles, and the five star we could never afford. What is it? Brandy? It's brandy,
Sal:isn't it? It's brandy. We we did we may have caused a headache or two in mixing one star Metaxa into oh my god. Do you remember what we poured into those barrels to make that cocktail?
Mark:To make rum. To make rum. Rum punch sort of thing.
Sal:Rum punch.
Mark:Oh, no. Brandy punch. So what drinks are you would you like to have on board?
Sal:Lemoncello is my
Mark:So how will you have a lemoncello? I mean, when?
Sal:I like a lemoncello of an evening.
Mark:Yeah. But before or after dinner?
Sal:No. Not as a digestive. I I like it before dinner. Like I it as an appetit. Oh.
Sal:I like and I'm a white wine. I'm just a straight white wine mixer. For those who know me well, they will know that I get I'm actually allergic to alcohol. I get, horrible, horrific migraines from alcohol. But strangely, what I've come to know is it's only Australian alcohol.
Sal:I don't happen to, have that same, thing here. What about you, Mark?
Mark:Well, I've been sampling a few beers and in Australia, you get the mareti beer with the old man and the hat on the front, and it's always a bit average. But here, I've discovered that last night, they make a mareti, which is red. Oh. Or like a dark beer. Which was really delicious.
Mark:So I'm not sure if I can find some of that to bring it aboard. Yeah. And then for definitely for a the Averna. Averna. So.
Sal:Such a pretty bottle too.
Mark:Very happy. A little a little after dinner and Averna. Averna. Be good. And no doubt we should try some Sicily and wine but, I don't really know how to.
Sal:The other tally that I have going for this summer is the greatest gelato in the world. The greatest
Mark:Your time's up, so I'm just giving you the wine.
Sal:Gelato gelato in the world, comes from Albia so far, according to me. Last night, I did try the pistachio cream in Trapani. Usually, they have it inside a bun. There was a lot of bun action going on with the
Mark:Now it's like a sort of brioche thing. It's traditional. Again, we photographed it in Guy's book.
Sal:Have you tried it? Oh, you're not an ice cream eater.
Mark:No. I don't eat ice cream.
Sal:You don't eat ice cream. And yeah. So I I didn't partake in that. It just felt like a it's sort of like a unsweet doughnut filled with local cold creamy stuff. Don't know.
Sal:There are a few kids that were being handed them, and they didn't look that delighted. I think the kids were really, can I please have the chocolate encrusted pine? So Sam and Jim arriving tomorrow. We're heading, we're heading east. We're heading east, but we're going to go south around the base of Sicily.
Sal:Mark, we didn't even get on to your coup of fixing the toilet because you did the most extraordinary job yesterday.
Mark:Yep. I spent some quality time in the after head.
Sal:How you fit in there is just
Mark:It's still like we've got some damage to the base of the toilet. So we had a a toilet base sent to London to but it hasn't managed to find us yet. However, in the meantime, the handle broke, and so we pulled the whole thing apart. And we're not talking the clean end of the pump, we're talking the dirty end of the pump. But I pulled it all apart and washed it and sanitized it, put it all back together, and it's just beautifully.
Mark:You know?
Sal:Pumping a tree.
Mark:Beautifully. It's a pleasure to go to the bathroom.
Sal:Oh, and that does go into our holding tank.
Mark:So Yeah. It does go into the holding
Sal:tank. Yeah. Yeah. So we're we're not pushing any any forms of bay. That's probably it from us.
Mark:A good note to end on? A whole new tank?
Sal:Shit of a shit of a show. And
Mark:We'll be back next week. Okay. Bye.