The Mediterranean is like the sky. As an air traffic controller, sometime pilot and frequent passenger, I know how difficult it can be to spot another aeroplane in piece of sky I know to be busy.
Similarly at sea where plenty of vessels merchant and private operate it still surprises me that one can sail for miles and see no other ship.
Today, out of the wind, it was a beautiful day. Heading pretty much east we passed the island of Asinara and were headed tantalisingly for the straits of Bonifacio where you pass between Corsica and Sardinia. I have visited neither island and wanted to see both in daylight.
Waiting for exactly such landfall you can easily put yourself in the minds of the ancients so beautifully captured in his Troy trilogy by David Gemmell before his premature departure from this fragile life. Here we were today on Gemmell’s “Great Green”. With his prose in mind it was easy to capture the awe of those who sailed thousands of years before us. For all its known proportions today, the Mediterranean is sufficiently vast and sufficiently unpredictable to have seemed to the ancient mind to be a world itself. We know the whole world today if we have not yet tamed it and yet, within the almost enclosed Middle Sea lie such great distances between its alluring islands that those who set out in the most modest of vessels must indeed have been brave or driven.
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