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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.
Ready. Okay then. You go for it.
Sal:Welcome back to MATILDA RADIO. I am Sal Balharrie.
Mark:And I'm Mark Chew.
Sal:And today, we are coming to you from the deck, actually, as we motor sail along the coast of Sicily. We have an action packed drama show today packed with drama, Mark.
Mark:It's funny because it's a week since we did the last one, and I can't remember a whole lot of dramas that happened. I'm I'm gonna Can I paint a picture of where we're sitting? Yeah. Do. So we're on the 4 Deck and we're going along at about six knots and there's a gentle breeze.
Mark:We got the engine ticking over because a, need we to recharge the batteries and b, we wouldn't be going very fast if we didn't, and the auto helm's on and we're sort of keeping a look at as we go along. So if there's any loud bangs, that's because we stop paying attention.
Sal:Do you have to say that the weather in Sicily I don't I think I think Queensland might have got a bit early with their beautiful one day and perfect the next, but you have to admit, '29 to '32, '24 overnight is pretty close to perfection.
Mark:You might not have said that when we were motoring along into the world's darkest, most lightning film filled thunderstorm last Yeah. That was
Sal:pretty dramatic.
Mark:As we went along and sudden shifts wind.
Sal:Getting ahead of yourself, DRAMA!
Mark:Up to 30 knots suddenly. That wasn't perfect one day. What is it? Magnificent the next?
Sal:Well, we will talk about the cloud inversion that seems to hang over the the mountain tops of Sicily. We'll come back to that, but, because that is that is one of my points of drama for the week, the lightning. In other in other breaking news, a little less dramatic, but we have had guests on board all this week. We have had the delightful Sam and Jim Woods who've who are actually hands on wheel or hands on Tamagotchi as we speak.
Mark:The Tamagotchi being the remote auto helm steering device.
Sal:Yeah.
Mark:It's not actually a Tamagotchi, but if you're your neck and you're wandering around the boat, you can still steer.
Sal:It's a Tamagotchi for a grown up man. You love it. You have wear
Mark:a boot and a a leg and round in circles.
Sal:So that is another point of drama, Mark. If you ever fall off this boat and the ladder is not down, there's absolutely no way of ever getting
Mark:back to
Sal:Spot 47. Well, I would be tucked up asleep. Actually, I'd be tucked up downstairs watching a show, and you'd be
Mark:I reckon you'd you'd get the idea that the boat was going round and round in circles, and you'd wonder what was going on. And you'd come come and let the ladder down for me to climb back on board.
Sal:You'd have to wait wait till the episode finished, and then I'd come and rescue you. But we get ahead of ourselves once again. I wanna circle back to the drama of the week, Mark.
Mark:Can we not use circle back? It's like such a corporate phrase.
Sal:I want to return. I want to revise. I want to review, the drama of the week. And, Mark, it has a name, and it's called the Four Peak Fiasco. Run us through your take of the four peak fiasco.
Mark:This is gonna get personal.
Sal:That's okay.
Mark:I can
Sal:deal with it as can you.
Mark:So Sal has made enormous sacrifices moving around the board on board the boat. Huge. Huge sacrifices. One of them is Space. Whittling down her wardrobe from, I don't know, maybe about 20 or 30 square meters of clothes storage to about three or four.
Sal:I miss them desperately. And Can I just say what my boxes are No?
Mark:You can't. Not now. I'd hide. No. Because I'm talking
Sal:In Australia?
Mark:Anyway, so most of the boat is filled with what's left of Sal's wardrobe.
Sal:So unfair.
Mark:And she likes to sleep close to it or have access
Sal:I to don't. I just don't like having my clothes scrunched up in little balls. I don't want to feel like I'm in camping. I want to feel like I'm living.
Mark:It's too complicated to explain. Anyway, back to the So basically, circle back. When the guests arrived, Sal decided she wanted to sleep in the forepeak, which for a whole lot of reasons, I think is not a good idea. Can you
Sal:describe what that means?
Mark:So that means sleep up the front, the v, the pointy bit of the boat. Yep. The beds beds are skinny. The mattresses are hard. You can't get into the cockpit.
Mark:You can't actually be at the sort of at the control center of the boat. What else? There's a whole lot of other things that are not good about it. But we there while the guests are here and And
Sal:haven't I paid for it? Oh my god. I mean, The grumpiness.
Mark:It's just a real The grumpiness had a failure.
Sal:To me for three days.
Mark:That's not true.
Sal:Was Oh, I'm sorry.
Mark:I was too busy surviving.
Sal:No. You're so grumpy because you can't have a good night's sleep. I must I must admit the bunk for for
Mark:Grow man.
Sal:For well, and a large man, the the bunks are particularly thin.
Mark:So we're moving back to the aft cabin when Sam and Jim go?
Sal:Look. The thing that's hard for me is I is that I mean, I really feel like to I'm gonna blame Scott Kaufman once again for his his design of a of a of a 1970s cruiser that had very little storage space for, for ladies clothing, women's clothing. Makeup. Look. I'll to be fair, I Three
Mark:cupboards is not enough.
Sal:I do have a lot of SPF 50 going on and potentially. Anyway, it's boring, but it has been it's been really boring.
Mark:Are we moving back into the aft cabin?
Sal:Yes. We'll move back to we will no. We're always going to move back.
Mark:No. But what about when the next guests arrive?
Sal:To be fair, I is it too much to ask for a little bit of privacy when you're getting dressed, or is it should I just get dressed in like, do I just go, hey, everybody, here are my boobs and my bum.
Mark:Is that what I have? If you do.
Sal:So that has been a big whether or not Sal and Mark moved from one end of the boat to the other end of the boat has has become known as four beak fiasco. TRAPANI. So Sam Sam and Jim met us at TRAPANI. Is that how you pronounce it? TRAPANI.
Sal:TRAPANI. TRAPANI. I'd need to get my little Italian expert, my daughter, onto it. Believe italians pronounce the syllables as they come. So we do big shout out to our Italian mates.
Sal:Let us know. Or TRAPANI. TRAPANI. TRAPANI. TRAPANI.
Sal:Don't know. But it was great. We were there at anchor. I think we may have touched on this last week. And then so tell us where we've been this week.
Sal:So TRAPANI
Mark:is Northwest Corner Of Sicily and we chose to go around the South Coast Of Sicily which I think we mentioned last week and we have done that and right as I speak now not one less than one nautical mile off the Port Bow is the Southeast Corner Of Sicily which we're about to go around and head up towards Siracusa. So we've we've sort of traversed the South Coast Of Sicily over the week, which has been beautiful. I mean, we've had some relatively long days. We had a sort of an eight hour day and a couple of six hour days, but it's pretty relaxing sailing. It's nothing too stressful.
Mark:Yeah. And nice breezes apart from the thunderstorms, which did you want to talk about some more?
Sal:Well, I do. It's it's so interesting. The and I'm not quite sure what creates this. We need a we need a helicopter pilot in our midst if if there's a helicopter pilot, Roger Dundas, or clouds. We could get clouds on the podcast.
Sal:Or Miles Hunt. Miles. Miles Hunt. I need some information, please, about why Sicily attracts this kind of inversion every afternoon, or it sort of builds over the course of a week. Massive thunderstorms, massive massive thunderstorms, beautiful sheets of lightning, and it really was dramatic, and it looked like there was sort of you could sort of almost see, like, how a child draws lightning, jagged lightning, and it was as if the lightning was going from sort of dot to dot.
Sal:It really was incredible.
Mark:And in fact, Jim on board, custodian of the Margaret Pearl, said, hey, Mark. Has this boat got lightning protection? And do you know what I answered? I've got no idea.
Sal:At which point, we went into a harbor and Saul was heard to say, wow. We're the tallest mast in the harbor, which is never a good thing to be.
Mark:One thing that we forgot to talk about, probably partly last weekend and so far this week is these three islands of the Western End Of Sicily which I hadn't really heard of but definitely deserve a mention. I haven't got their names in front of me, so what are they called?
Sal:They are called Lavazo, Lavonzo, Maretimo, and Vavignana.
Mark:Yep. And they're sort of between
Sal:Very happy with my accent there. Sorry? I'm happy with my accent.
Mark:Oh, good. They're between about twelve and twenty five miles off the coast and they're these big lumps of rock and some sandy beaches and they're quite well developed. There's lots of ferry services that go to them and they're obviously surviving off tourism mostly, I think, nowadays. But they're very beautiful, and the the the water and the anchorage is quite spectacular. And although you're not allowed to anchor in the bays because they're nominally a marine reserve, you can pick up mooring boys and you get charged for it, but I think it's quite a reasonable way to restrict sort of overtourism on the on the islands.
Sal:I don't think they are developed. I was beautifully surprised by how authentic they were. And I think as you and I went around to that sort of little cluster, particularly on Livonza where we had a beautiful dinner, and we went around in the dinghy to go and sort of make a booking. And as we were coming back, there was a stunning sort of villa. I mean, it it seems that Yep.
Sal:There's been quite a lot of buildup and over the sort of in the fifties and sixties. But there's only, what, 50 houses? Sixties, 70 houses, and a big net.
Mark:Protecting one of the islands.
Sal:Yeah. Just one of the islands. This is Lavunza. But this particular villa really struck our caught my eye. It was so beautiful.
Sal:Then later on when we went back for dinner, we happened to ask the woman who was running the the restaurant whose villa this was, and it turns out that it's Mucha Prada's villa, which, you know, I just find that extraordinary. She is the CEO CEO of PRONOUNCE, the the the label PRONOUNCE, and I just find it amazing that here's this woman, $10,000,000,000. She probably got a 100 houses all over the world, but people know that she comes to this island. She's very discreet, and she comes ashore and goes for a swim and enjoys it, which I just I just found that absolutely beautiful. Just thought that was incredible.
Mark:Can we talk
Sal:about Empedocle? Yes. Let's talk
Mark:about Empedocle. So about halfway oh, no. Probably about just a third of the way along the South Coast Of Sicily, the sort of the tourist attraction which Sal will talk about in a sec is called Agrigento. Agrigento. Okay.
Mark:Agrigento. This is gonna be called the pronunciation issue.
Sal:It is.
Mark:And this is where Greek temples were built a few 100 years BC, but we'll come back to that. Yeah. But the harbor nearest to that is quite an industrial harbor where the ferries to the southern Italian islands of Lampedusa and Pantonella, they all leave to go from here. So it's an industrial sort of gritty city and there's only four berths in the commercial harbor and it's not very clean and and It
Sal:was fantastic.
Mark:There's no water or power on the quay and it's it's but it's a real town and I really enjoyed staying there and you know lots of sort of sixties housing commission flats up behind the port which actually surprised me about the sort of the the standard of living is pretty tough. You know we're not talking sort of African slums but it's certainly a lot worse
Sal:than any. Gonna pull you up on that. I don't think they were built as housing commission. They were actually built in 1958 to service the oil refinery that is now being dismantled. So I think a lot of that I think it was a working town.
Sal:We we both went for a walk up through there at different stages. I tend to get up very early in the morning. I wake at 05:30, and so I tend to get up and do some exercise or go for a walk. And I was, really amazed when I went for a walk up the mount up the hill. Like, I felt slightly uncomfortable on my own.
Sal:I felt like I was somewhere pretty pretty raw and very, very, very poor. The rubbish was immense. But last week on SWS, that beautiful, mural that I that I, took a photograph photograph of. Of, The the street art was from the seventies was really quite amazing that I think this this place is kind of very proud of its working class history.
Mark:The reason really for us going there was it was the easiest access to these famous Greek temples, which Sal really wanted to see. And I was a little bit cynical about, you know, wandering around ruins with with tourists. However, Sal organizes tour, and we went on it, and I have to say it was fantastic. Well, you long Yes.
Sal:So we we organized this tour. Don't you find a a used chat to find a tour the day before online, and we found this absolute gem of a man, Luigi, through an organized company. We met him on-site, and he took us through what is called the Valley Of The Temples. It's not really a valley. It's more sites that were built by the Greeks two and a half thousand years ago.
Sal:It was extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary. Many of the temples have been rebuilt, but one temple remained intact. I mean, I love a tour. I just I love hearing the knowledge. I love hearing the stories.
Sal:What did you find from that?
Mark:One of the things that I took away from it that really impressed me was that it wasn't just the four temples. It was a huge sort of city at the time. And Luigi actually claimed that it was the fourth biggest city in the world in about 200 BC, I think. Is that right?
Sal:Yeah. I think that's about right. I think it was 300,000.
Mark:The fourth biggest city in the world. We've sort of done a bit of fact checking on that. Not convinced about that. It may been the fourth biggest city in Europe because I think there might have been some Asian cities that got in there. But when you see this sort of this valley of of of of plants and it's sort of overgrown now.
Mark:It's sort of very hard to imagine this is a thriving Greek city, but then these three great temples sort of rise out of the bushes.
Sal:You spoke about, you know, obviously, it was cited for water. That was the biggest thing. But I I I mean, just the ability to organize people and live, you know, two and a half thousand years ago with such I mean, they I think it it sort of read reading between the lines, it sounded that there was sort of about a 150. You you needed to luck out to, be born in the generations of general peace before once again the Carthagens came and raided or the the Romans Romans came came and and sacked sacked or or the the rebranded Carthagens came as punics and all, you know, there was obviously constant siege, but it was spoken about as being these temples on a hill that just from out at sea just gleamed with white white stucco, and they were they were seriously seriously beautiful.
Mark:So, yeah, I'm not usually into that sort of thing, but having this wonderful guide and taking time walking around it just before sunset was very special. So I make a mental note to myself to be less cynical about some tours.
Sal:I think one of the things we've noticed about sailing down the coast of Sicily, particularly this little patch of Sicily, is just 100 kilometers of white sheds of that are that are actually hot houses. And in doing a bit of research, I've discovered that the hot houses actually have packing houses and sorting houses next to them. So they're massive massive facilities. And Basically, Sicily is pretty much the food bowl of, Europe for anything that can be grown in a hot house. So tomatoes, eggplants, everything that's coming here is has to therefore get on a ship to get out and to be, you know, distributed.
Sal:But it's in pretty impressive impressive setup.
Mark:Yeah. So Next sort of major stop is, as we mentioned earlier, Syracuse, which is about 20 miles from here, where we'll probably spend a few days. I think there's meant to be lots of good places to explore up there. So since we last spoke to you, we would have covered, I think, probably about over 200 nautical miles just day sailing. And the boat's going along nicely.
Mark:We haven't had any major issues. We fixed a couple of things. We had trouble with our furler we've had since the start of the year where although it works, was taking a lot of load to furl and unfurl the head so which wraps around the force day for those of us who are not sailors. It's a it's the big sail at the front of the boat. It was very stiff and we'd have to wind it in and out.
Mark:But with the help of Jim and Sail, we managed to work out why it was so stiff and released it a little bit and worked that out. And it made me think that one of the things that you've got to address on a boat is when there's a a problem and you find a workaround for it, that you don't accept the workaround as the as the established way of doing things. I've been living with the furler not working because I could just about make it work. And, sometimes I think that's, that's a dangerous thing. You know, it's almost better if things break completely, then you gotta fix them.
Sal:I think it also helped having an extra set of hands on the boat because sometimes if I point things out, like, you know, I've been pointing out for a while that I was not happy with the furler, and it would I think when we had somebody else to help travel trouble it
Mark:troubleshoot it. Yeah. Yeah. No. Absolutely.
Mark:More people makes things easier. I
Sal:think dinner of the week, Mark?
Mark:Dinner of the week. I think the melonsana that you did the what do you call it?
Sal:Oh, eggplant parmigiana.
Mark:Eggplant parm melonsana parmigiana.
Sal:That was pretty exceptional. I was going to say your fish cakes last night were and, the purple cabbage salad was equally enjoyable. We did catch
Mark:fish, but it got away.
Sal:We did catch a fish, but it got away. So we fortunately didn't have to kill the fish, which makes me very happy. Win of the week for me goes to the Blue Boys again. Listen to every single second of that game against Rich and Richmond yesterday. I have to say it wasn't a fabulous win.
Sal:Didn't sound like a fantastic game. And, Mark, this week, do you wanna know who our sponsor is this week?
Mark:Tell me.
Sal:It's very it's really exciting. We have two sponsors this week. Red Bull are sponsoring us this week, and J Co Caravan's also sponsoring us this week because the Tour de France kicked off yesterday. And, I'm going for I'm really like I'm obviously, I'm keen on teams that have Aussies. You know, we've got the Pog and Vinegar is out in front after day one.
Sal:But Red Bull Red Bull, we've got Jay Hindley is ride riding Australian Jay is riding for Rem for Remco Evanapole. But Jayco, Ben O'Connor. Ben O'Connor and this is
Mark:this No. I've got no idea what you're talking about.
Sal:Tour, Mark. Tour.
Mark:You know what it is. Cycling expert about two days before the Tour de France and then Love it. And then loses interest the day it finishes.
Sal:I think Sam and Jim have been a little bit concerned about our degree of sport intake, but, you know, what can I say? What can I say?
Mark:I don't think I don't think we're really that into the Tour de France too.
Sal:Oh my god. I couldn't be more into it if I tried.
Mark:Well, I think that's about it. For our week aboard Matilda, traversing the breadth of Sicily from west to east, I've had a very special week. I think I've enjoyed it enormously. And I'm looking forward to moving on to Mainland Italy and then on to the Ionian and Greece in the next few weeks. But I've my memories of Sicily will be will be good.
Mark:What's what what's the things that have stuck in your mind?
Sal:Well, I think Agrijenta, for me, just the scale of that site, those it was just it was just something that I was just so unexpected, so unexpected. And just being able to see those columns from the sea and and then stand on those columns and look back out to sea and just the scale and the breadth and things that have been here. So, you know, I I guess that's why we come to Europe to experience that European culture of sort of two and a half thousand years, three thousand years. It's it's pretty extraordinary. Then add to that just the the clarity of the water.
Sal:Still it just remains gobsmacking to be able to dive into this crystal crystal crystal clear water. How about you? Yeah. I think that that
Mark:those are things that will stick in my mind too. I think probably the thing that sort of sort of fascinates me the most is the nature of the communities here in Sicily. Obviously, we've only seen the coastal communities, but, you know, you see you hear about and think about Italy as this glamorous place, but, gee, we're a long way from Milan here. The the the sort of the lifestyle and the level of affluence is in some ways more reminiscent of maybe some of the Asian or African towns I've been to rather than what we consider to be modern European.
Sal:In fact, that's something that we've really remarked upon just sort of walking along the beaches, going for a walk in the morning or the afternoon, just the lack of iPhones and kids just playing really old fashioned games. It's, you know, kicking kicking soccer balls at each other with a with a chair and into the water and chairs as goalposts. And it's just there is a it is a a slightly slower pace here, isn't it?
Mark:Yeah. And I think that's quite a quite a nice thing to see. Till there ever's run down.
Sal:So meanwhile, I've been chunking through book through books. I've just started a new one today, about Corfu, which I'll mention next week. Yesteryear, I was very I was delighted to have responses from listeners and, watch this space, Mark. I think there's going to be a MATILDA RADIO book group that we'll do via Zoom coming up in the coming months. Believe we'll have capacities for about four or 500 listeners, so that should be a bit of fun.
Sal:And remember to follow us. Follow us on Spotify. Follow us on Apple. At the moment, we're the lowest rating podcast on the whole of Apple. So let's try and see if we can build our following to be in the bottom 10 at least.
Sal:That would be fun, wouldn't it?
Mark:Are we really?
Sal:The lowest
Mark:the lowest podcast on Apple?
Sal:Well, at the moment, I have no idea. I'm sure we are. Oh, oh, well. We're the newest out of the gate. That's gonna be what we're trying to trying to climb and achieve.
Sal:Let's get into the top 50,000 or something.
Mark:I don't
Sal:know how many podcasts there are in this world, but I'm sure there are quite a few. But, yeah, remember to follow us on Spotify. We're coming out every Sunday night, Monday morning?
Mark:Monday morning Australian time.
Sal:Monday morning Australian time. So until next week. Thanks for listening. Bye.