© ErN 126,
entry July 2004
Of Ships & Sails & Water Cabs
—and Poor Little Rich Girls
I had my maiden voyage
last summer as a real sailor along the southern
Campanian coast of the stunning Cilento national park.
I learned "starboard" and "port," and —squinting my eye
and brandishing my hook (though brandished eye and
squinted hook may also work)— how to say, "Arrr, matey, fortune
rides the shoulders of them what schemes!"
Thus, I now find myself taking a more personal interest
in things of the sea here in the bay of Naples this
summer.
The
Italian naval training vessel, the Amerigo Vespucci,
was in port a few weeks ago. She is a "tall ship," one
of those spectacular square-rigged vessels that, under
full sail, glide along like clouds of silver from
another age. Interestingly, the Vespucci is more
modern than she looks, built in 1930 (in the shipyards
of Castellammare di Stabia
near Naples). In Naples, the Vespucci was moored
at the main passenger terminal at Beverello Pier right
next to one of those new luxury barges that are larger
than an aircraft carrier, and carry 3,500 passengers and
1,000 crew. The good ship Godzilla —the ugliest
things afloat.
Since
there is a regatta coming up, the waters are now swarming
with good-looking craft. One of them is the sleek and
graceful four-master, Phocea (photo), property of
Lebanese billionaire Mouna Ayoub. She made her money by
being unhappily married to a wealthy Saudi for 18 years,
so I see how she had the $5.5 million dollars for that
boat. She bought it from the ex-mayor of Marseilles,
Bernard Tapie. I don't know how a mayor could afford the Phocea,
but Bernie did spend sevens months in jail
for defrauding the Olympique Marseilles football club of $15 million. The Phocea
was designed by Michel Bigoin and built at the Toulon
Naval Dockyard in 1976 for yachtsman Alain Colas.
Amazingly, Colas then sailed the Phocea in the
Observer Single-Handed Transatlantic Race. The boat is 246
feet (75 meters) long, and Colas sailed her alone
(!) across the
Atlantic.
[Phocea
update 2014 here.]
As
the summer gears up, the bay is also aroar with
jet-skis, dangerously in the hands of ego-driven
speed–merchants. I have read somewhere that they are not
supposed to do any vroom-vrooming within 300
meters of shore. I am waiting for two or ten of them to
collide. I hold daily vigil with a pair of binoculars
from my balcony. So far, no luck, but the summer is
still young. Two hydrofoils, though, had a low-speed
"fender bender" in the port the other day. It scared the
150 passengers, but no one was hurt. Admiral Pierluigi
Cacioppo, commander of the port, chalked the incident up
to understandable human error. Beverello Pier is at
saturation point. There are 215 departures and arrivals
a day of regularly scheduled boats to Capri, Ischia and
the Sorrentine peninsula. The passenger pier runs 17 out
of 24 hours. That's one boat coming or going every five
minutes. Add to that congestion the presence of large
cruise ships moored at Beverello and the nightly
departures of large car ferries
to Sardinia and Sicily.
The
newest wrinkle is the water-taxi. They don't call it that;
they call it the Metro del
Mare, the allusion being to the metropolitana,
the new urban train line in Naples —a sea-train, in other
words. But it's still a water taxi. The routes cover the
coast of the Campania region, starting at Monte di Procida
at the western end of the gulf of Naples and finishing
down south at Sapri, the last town in Campania. Stops
include Pozzuoli, Naples, Sorrento, Capri,
Amalfi, Salerno, and towns down the Cilento coast along
the string of medieval Saracen
watch towers perched on the hills of the still
isolated coastal range. The fares are comparable to those
of the train. It's not as fast as the express train but
not much slower than a local, and you get a spectacular
sea trip in the bargain. After all, a train is still a
train. (I know…a sigh is still a sigh…).
Sigh,
indeed. Now that Mouna is single again, I can see myself
springing aboard the metro del mare, making a
grand gesture out towards the Phocea, and yelling
up to the skipper: "Cabbie, follow that boat!"
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