The summer heat always brings crowds to the Amalfi area and the road traffic becomes very heavy indeed, the car parks here in Amalfi are generally full by about 9am and then you must queue and wait for one car to leave so that you can enter. And this morning at 9am it was already very warm indeed so waiting in the car becomes very sweaty indeed so tempers often flare too.
And the sea becomes very crowded too. We have all sorts of boats and ships from cruise ships that anchor offshore and unload 2,000 passengers at a time to the small boats that one can rent for a few hours without any licence at all, they have an outboard with maximum 40 horsepower and are great fun.
However accidents can happen and indeed do happen if you forget the simple rules of common sense (which seems to be ever less present these days). So only a week ago (as I write this mid August 2023) we had two of the most horrible sea accidents that I had ever heard of. A well known American lady was visiting the coast with the husband and kids and they had rented a villa as well as a boat with skipper to take them to see the sights.
But the small boat on which they were travelling had a collision with a much larger vessel and the lady was thrown into the water and was killed by the propellor. See this chilling ANSA report https://www.ansa.it/english/news/general_news/2023/08/04/tourist-death-crash-skipper-positive-in-toxicology-test_57e364e9-2146-49e9-954d-d36c72f937dd.html Tragically she died in full view of her two young children.
Fast forward a few days and three friends rent a small boat in Salerno and drive to have lunch in Conca, a thirty minute drive. On the way back towards Salerno they commit a minor error and fail to turn into a wave, one of the three was distracted and fell overboard. No problem, the guy at the wheel should have simply stopped the boat and switched off the engine. Instead he reversed and killed the guy in the water. Four days later the body of this poor guy still cannot be found as the sea is over 40m deep where it happened. An Italian report follows https://www.ilvescovado.it/it/cronaca-17/il-mare-di-cetara-e-al-setaccio-per-trovare-manuel-122540/article
Two terrible and avoidable deaths in the space of a few days. Awful. PS the body of the poor guy has still not been located afetr 10 days.
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