Medicane!

This blog post is written from a talk I gave to the ITI Media, Arts and Tourism network’s “Show’n’Tell” event in November 2020 and to the ITI Wessex regional group’s “Linguists for Sail” webinar in April 2021. The latter event prompted an application to establish a new subject group within the ITI – the Sailing & Boating network. Scroll down for the words and to the bottom for a couple of videos.

 

Medicane ITI

 

Come to sunny Greece, they said. It’s lovely winds, they said. Don’t worry, you won’t need your wets. Well, we know that’s not entirely true because we normally spend several weeks a year sailing in Greece, offering sailing holidays and instruction on our yacht, Cloud Nine. She’s 45 feet long, sleeps six in comfort (more in less comfort) and is capable of crossing an ocean.

We sail on the western side of Greece, around the islands of the Ionian sea, and sailing there is usually just as you imagine it to be (see slides 7 and 8).

Given that, when you see a weather forecast like the one on slide 9 on a lovely hot day in late September, you take it seriously. For those of you not familiar with these sort of forecasts, the white arrows show wind direction, the colours are wind strength. Even then, weather can be so localised that you don’t necessarily trust higher-level forecasts. We always speak to the locals because they are always spot on and they said we should get out now from where we were moored up, nearly 24 hours earlier than we’d planned based on the forecast. This forecast on the Wednesday morning suggested the storm would track south of Zakynthos. As we watched the forecasts, it started tracking further and further north, and in the end the epicentre passed directly over Argostoli and Ayia Euphemia on Cephalonia, causing massive damage there and in the villages on Ithaca. The epicentre tracked only 15-20 nautical miles south of where we holed up.

It was clear we would have to be prepared for extremely strong winds and very heavy rain. So what do you do?

Well the first thing is to find the safest haven you can, somewhere safe to hide. This is where we drew on our local knowledge and decided to head for Vathi on the island of Meganisi. Vathi is about 30 nautical miles north of the forecast track of the storm, but only about 15 miles north of the track it actually took. Given that yachts typically assume a normal speed of around 5 knots or 5 nautical miles per hour, getting completely out of the track of the storm wasn’t an option. However, Vathi is a long deep bay, open only to the NW with high hills all around, so it gives very good shelter from almost every direction, but especially from the SE. We sat out another big storm here in September 2018, so we know it actually gives better shelter than the chart would suggest. This is just one example of the thought processes you have to go through when making such critical decisions – it’s not just a case of knowing where you’re going to go and what you’re going to do. You need to know why, you have to consider what might happen and take precautions accordingly.

It’s also a case of getting all the information you possibly can. It’s not an exam situation where everything is supposed to be “all your own work”. In our case, there’s a great Facebook group called the Friends of Levkas Marina, and it’s very much a case of “pay it forward”. I posted that there was still space; in return, people in other places – Levkas marina itself, further north, other islands, and even in the worst-hit places such as Argostoli – kept everyone updated through the 48 hours of the storm and provided a huge source of moral support. However bad it gets, maintaining contact and just knowing you’re not completely alone can make all the difference. And in the end, there were three boats in Vathi who had been communicating via this group (because we couldn’t get off our boats), and also the Women Who Sail the Med group, and we all met up for a drink or three afterwards. As you can imagine, we also needed to make sure our phones were as fully charged as possible at all times – I was checking 4 different forecasts every hour or two throughout the storm, which lasted 48 very long hours.

So what could happen?

Well, we were expecting very heavy rain, indeed torrential – so first of all we needed to make sure that every hatch was closed so no water could get into the boat.

We were also expecting strong winds – maybe not as strong as at the epicentre, but even though we were at a bit of a distance and in a sheltered bay, we needed to make sure there was nothing lying around that could blow away and get lost, or fly off and hurt someone. It’s also common for sails to be ripped to shreds in major storms, so we closed the sail bag, made sure it was completely zipped up and strapped tight. We also furled the headsail many more times than usual so the sheets, which are the ropes that control it, were wrapped round it many times. We considered taking off the bimini, the sun shade over the cockpit, but with the rain we expected, it was a balancing act between shelter and the risk of it being damaged.

We also knew we would be getting winds from the SE – which was fine because they would be behind the boat blowing us off the concrete quay – but the wind would then move round to the N, blowing down the bay which would be much worse. We would have to pull the boat as far off the quay as the length of our mooring ropes would allow – we ended up about 4 metres off, and wouldn’t have wanted to be much closer even though it meant we couldn’t then get to shore if we wanted or needed to (which was another decision-making balancing act). The waves being pushed into the bay would also cause the boat to snatch at the mooring lines. We considered doubling up those lines in case they snapped, but in the end we put on what are known as spring lines, to stop a sideways yawing movement if the wind wasn’t directly on our nose, and they would also have acted as mooring lines had the main lines snapped. These were just a few of the many decisions we had to make.

In short, there are a huge number of decisions where you have to weigh up the benefits of a course of action against the possible disadvantages to that same course of action. The key is to *make* a decision, one that is based on as much information and the best information you can get, even if it is incomplete, and then commit to it. And then have confidence in that decision as the best one you could have made taking all the known factors into consideration, including the “known unknowns”. That should, in theory, leave the “unknown unknowns” as the remaining variable. It’s far easier – and on the water, safer – to have to deal with just a handful of aspects that you have put into the “I can’t know that” box or “I couldn’t have foreseen that” box, because you’ve already planned what you’re going to do in most other situations, than to have to react to a whole host of eventualities hitting you because you haven’t thought ahead about what could happen and what the potential consequences might be.

This principle is one you can apply to a whole range of situations in life, whether you’re looking at personal life decisions (even down to everyday purchases), work decisions – or even translation choices. Think about what questions you might have to answer – to your spouse, a client or a court! – and deal with them ahead of time as far as you can. In short, be able to defend your decisions and choices, at the very least to yourself.

In the end we were perfectly fine. There was only one boat in Vathi that suffered any damage. It was a very long 48 hours, though, and it’s always worse in the dark. Even if you don’t have the terror of imminent catastrophic damage, the constant worry – have you made the right decisions? Have you considered every possible eventuality? Is the weather going to do something not in the forecast? – and the watch-keeping, all takes its toll, it’s exhausting. You catch the odd hour or so of sleep, taking turns to keep an eye out for damage and changes in conditions while trying not to get too wet, but of course you don’t sleep well or deeply, because you know you have to be ready to react and make good decisions at a moment’s notice no matter how tired you might be.

The ship’s cat, Captain Carrot of Cloud Nine, was decidedly miffed at having to stay below for all that time – but it was the only safe place for him.

We were lucky though; the storm didn’t track any further north, our decision-making and precautions proved to be sufficient – others were not so lucky, or made poorer decisions. One delivery skipper – a Kiwi – actually left the safe haven of Levkas marina the day before the storm – with that forecast! – and that boat was on Ithaca when the storm hit. It barely survived. Why did he do that? Turns out he simply didn’t believe the forecast. It’s the Med, it’s easy sailing, you don’t get storms – he thought. Well you do. Even if this one was of a once-in-a-century magnitude, storm are not uncommon. And they cause real damage. Some yachts in Ayia Eufemia on Cephalonia (slide 15) were the lucky ones – having been lifted out of the water by the storm, they were high and dry and badly damaged, but at least their crews could recover their belongings. Others were not so lucky and their boats sank. The crew of the yacht on slide 16 was a German couple who had anchored and taken a long line to shore. They were rescued by a fishing boat.

Pictures from before and after the medicane are shockingly stark. One of our favourite places in the world is Frikes on Ithaca. It is an oasis of charm in an idyllic setting with one of the best restaurants in the Ionian, where you sit right by the beach. After the storm, the canopies over the outside areas of the restaurants were gone, including their frames. The little fishing pontoon was gone. There were chairs and tables everywhere, trees down. The storm pushed the sea into the bay, which met the torrent flooding down from the hills, meeting in the village, destroying almost everything in its path. Assos on the west coast of Cephalonia was picture-postcard beautiful – but a rockslide tumbled down the hill like a river, burying everything in its path. Argostoli, the capital of Cephalonia was the epicentre of the storm; the recorded winds were 75 knots (or nearly 150 kph) steady, gusting to 120 knots (or nearly 240 kph) in the bay – that’s a full-blown category 1 hurricane. Headsails – even tightly furled – were shredded, and they were the lucky ones. A gorgeous ocean-going Najad was picked up like a toy and smashed. Boats collided with concrete quays and had their sterns ripped off. We later heard that 43 boats sank on Cephalonia alone.

Thankfully it was a once-in-a-century storm; in fact it’s the worst storm there has ever been in the area. And the last picture in the deck is far more representative of sailing in the Ionian. If you’d like to get a small taste of what it was like to live through, here are a couple of videos.

The first video is from our home base (6 minutes), various boats our pontoon manager looks after when their owners aren’t there:

 

The second video is longer (22 minutes), but right from the eye of the storm in Argostoli – it’s well worth the watch: