The start of Richard's crusade

On April 10th, 1191, Richard and his fleet sailed from Messina on the way to the Holy Land. It would have been a very colorful sight.
Here is the description of their departure from Messina in Lionheart, page 204.
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It was not until Wednesday in Holy Week that the royal fleet was ready to sail and most of the city turned out for the event, thankful that this foreign army was finally departing but also delighting in this extraordinary spectacle. More than two hundred ships and seventeen thousand soldiers and sailors. Large transport vessels called busses. Naves that relied only upon sails. And the ships that drew all eyes and evoked admiring murmurs from the townspeople—the sleek, deadly war galleys, painted in bright colors, their gunwales hung with shields, the red and gold banners of the English king streaming from their mastheads. The crusade of Richard Coeur de Lion was at last under way.
After such a dramatic departure from Messina, what followed was anticlimactic. The wind died and the fleet found itself becalmed off the coast of Calabria. They were forced to drop anchor and wait. After the sun set in a blood-red haze, many took comfort from the glow of the lantern placed aloft in Richard’s galley. He’d promised to light it each and every night, a guiding beacon for his ships, reassuring proof of his presence in the midst of the dark, ominous Greek Sea. The next day the winds picked up, but they remained weak and variable, and not much progress was made. Yet so far the voyage had been calm and for that, seventeen thousand souls were utterly thankful.
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But two days later they ran into a savage Good Friday storm that scattered the fleet and put Joanna and Berengaria in peril when their ship ran aground off the Cyprus coast.