To what extent does Homer's Greek text Odyssey give access to the knowledge of archaic nautical practices? Can similar practices of today's fishermen be better understood in the light of Homer's texts? To answer this question the author went sailing to the presumed places of Odysseus' navigations, made investigations among the last holders of empiric knowledge of sea, sky, clouds, thunderstorms and weather prognostication. After a brief description of present-day knowledge and of the navigation programme the author interprets Homer's text on the construction of a rescue raft by Odysseus in the light of ancient empirical knowledge. Then he describes the ancestral methods used by fishermen of the Lipari Islands to forecast the weather or more exactly to make meteorological prognostications. Their methods let appear a whole cosmology. Erudite knowledge inherited from antiquity or experience of randomness organized to explain strategies of control of the risks on sea?