The fury of the Med

Scylla and Charybdis are said to have sat off the Sicilian coast, where Mike Lynch’s boat foundered, and where 3,200 years before, Odysseus navigated between the monster and the whirlpool. Many think of the Med as a gentle sea, more like an oversized eternity pool, unbothered by the killer storms and cliff-high waves that rage beyond Gibraltar.

I thought that, too, before I was bashed up by wild tempests in the two years I criss-crossed the Mediterranean in Odysseus’s wake. One morning, I turned up at a hotel on Mykonos. As I made my way to the breakfast table, the agitated maître d’ shimmered up and said, ‘I’m so sorry, sir, the beach has been washed away overnight. But – not to worry – it’s being rebuilt now.’

The howling wind I’d heard the night before had ripped along the coast, and all the sand had been whipped away by a freak southerly wind.