Sea Cloud is lost in the blue. Floating on the blue, the Mediterranean, blue the sky above. The white sails try to catch the delicate breeze, like a soft breath, that blows over the water. We proceed at less than two knots to the east, to Kephalonia and Peloponnesus.
Sea Cloud is an ancient ship, but we don’t sail as the ancient sailors of the past. When the Greek went west, colonizing mostly of the south Mediterranean, nobody used to cross the sea along the shortcut as we are doing now. They used to sail along the coast, at visible distance. No maps, no lighthouses, no buoys or other navigation marks. For this reason, they wrecked lots of ships. Luckily we use these wrecks, when we found one, to re-built the history of navigation in the Mediterranean. The wrecks are an incredible source of details. One by one, as a giant puzzle, we discover how our progenitors explored the unknown world. What they brought with them to build a new nation. Robyn Woodward is just explaining that with her usual passion. This extraordinary historian is often aboard Sea Cloud, bringing history from past to present to teach us. No future without past. Robyn has a tough job to prepare our future.
I come from east genetically. My roots are Greek, from when they colonized the south of Italy, where I was born, building temples, acropolis and necropolis. Sea Cloud is bringing me back to the origins. The compass says 068 degrees. The imaginary line that connects Siracusa, the most famous Greek colony in Sicily, with Kephalonia. I’ve been crossing this water, the Ionian Sea, many times with a sailboat, a single mast monohull as well as a catamaran. I have so many memories about that. I remember as yesterday when at the age of 17 I’d seen the first time on the horizon the thin layer of the island of Zakinthos. My first time in Greece. From faraway any island is a thin layer floating on water. Slowly that I approached, then the real shape came out from the sea. As a seaman, captain, National Geographic photographer, from past to future, I still look at any thin layer on water with the same curiosity of my first time. I try to imagine the final shape when getting closer, and I make a wish to be sure to come back one day. I never have enough of Greece. About my roots.
