Sardinia to Levkas

We're finally here - journey's end for a while and I'm pleased, we've done just short of 3,000 miles since end of September and it's nice to know we can stay put for a while. Only down side is joining the working class again and having to get back into the discipline of working every day.

The last 500 miles have taken some time due to multiple storms. After waiting 10 days for good weather in Cagliari, thankfully we had two calm, but cold, nights at sea to get to Milazzo, Sicilly. We thought we would only be there one night then the final push to Greece. But like so much of the latter part of this trip it was not to be. We waited four days for the next weather window to get as far as Messina (east coast of Sicilly), 5 hours away. We met a couple of guys in Messina who attempted to get across to Greece a couple of days before we got to Messina. They'd got out 100 miles into their journey, at shortest it's 250 miles to Greece, and had to turn back due to severe gales.

Next day we set out for our final leg with a seemingly reasonable forecast however when we got around the toe of Italy we had winds up to 25 knots which gave us a very uncomfortable, long, cold first night at sea, and by midday the next day we had forecasts of F9 (severe) gale warnings. When your average speed is only 5 – 6 miles per hour, 250 miles is a long way and we just moored up at the fuel dock in Levkas at 4am the next morning before the big winds started. Time for a bit of shut eye.

That wasn’t to last though, a couple of hours later someone was knocking on the boat and up we got and moved to our berth. Time for more shut eye!!

Next morning we got a shock, looking from where we are berthed across to mainland Greece there's SNOW on the hills!! So much for being somewhere warm for winter. It's not too bad during the day in the sun, but the wind is cold and it's really cold at night, all the warmest bedding on now. Hopefully it should start warming up a bit in another 4 weeks, so I guess I can cope (she said manfully through gritted teeth) hahaha.

We've got free wifi on the boat thanks to our new wifi toys. There's paying wifi in the Marina but it's really expensive - long live free wifi!!

I also have to find somewhere to do my Pilates, which isn't going to be easy, it's too cold to do it outside right now. There is a walking club here for the live aboards so I think I'll slink along to that and see where they go. Mark will have to do without me for a couple of mornings a week, my social life has to start somewhere!!

Next blog will be describing living and working in a foreign country where the written language resembles nothing we’ve had to deal with so far. Learnt my first Greek word today in the barbecue chicken shop, the guy spoke really good English so I said to him “you speak good English” quick as lightening he said “so do you”!! Anyway he told me how to say thankyou in Greek which phonetically is ‘ef-har-ris-to’ now I can go around saying thankyou to everyone. There’s also spoken Greek classes here at the marina so I’ll be a regular there over the next few weeks so I should have some basics pretty quickly – time will tell. Till next time 'ya-sou'.

Marina checking in procedures

Checking procedures into marinas varies greatly from all your paperwork checked in minute detail, photocopied, entered onto paper forms, then entered onto computer to someone handing over a paper form for you to fill in yourself and nothing else even looked at and you never know which it will be until you begin. My question is though, what do they do with all this information, does it et sent somewhere, does anyone actually look at it and if they do what are they looking for and what will they do about it if they find it because by the time they do the boat has moved on. This part of our sailing life is the only remnant of daily bureaucracy that we’ve left behind and reminds me constantly of how quickly our view on life has changed. Our priorities now are provisioning, laundry, where shall I run today or is the wind in the right direction to get where we want to go next. The only conformity we need to worry about is what we set for ourselves. The memory of the stressful lives we led is slowly dimishing.

Alicante to Ibiza

New Years Day
New Years day dawned bright and sunny, a little chilly but the day would get warmer. Forecast for the next 2 – 3 days was light winds and smooth seas, perfect for an overnight run to Ibiza. Out of Alicante marina, dodge a big ship coming into the container port and out to the open sea. There’s always that tingle of excitement when setting off, whether you’re going 30 or 130 miles, perhaps because with the sea you can never know exactly what you’ll be faced with during the journey, and of course where ever we’re going we haven’t been there before, but today it’s lovely, for now anyway, and we begin this journey with the spinnaker up and sitting in the sunshine. We expect this trip to take around 23 hours, so we’ll get into Ibiza late tomorrow morning. As the day wore on the winds increased to the high teens, spinnaker came down, Genoa came out and our speed over the ground increased to over 7 knots (a knot is a bit less than a road mile), doesn’t sound fast but for our boat it’s a fast cruising speed and we plan our journey times on an average speed of 5 knots. As dusk arrived two things happened, first the winds increased further so we put a reef in the main and the Genoa, we were flying, at this rate we’ll be in Ibiza well ahead of 23 hours and second we had cause to radio a large ship and ask what his passing intentions were, if he continued on his course he would run us over. We would normally do all the changing of direction to keep out of their way but we were sailing on a run, see getting up so our manoeuvrability is restricted. After a quick discussion on the VHF, he agreed to alter his course to cross our bow with some sea room, even then he crossed only a couple of hundred meters off our bow, too close for my liking. A few hours later winds picked up a bit more and we put another reef in the main and Genoa and were hoping it wasn’t going to get up any further because what we were experiencing right then wasn’t forecast for another 2 days. It was going to be a slightly anxious night, for me anyway. I have great respect for the sea and how quickly things can change and we are sailing in the winter, even though the temperatures are nothing like the English winter, it’s still chilly at night and the winter storms can be fierce. But on top of that, it’s 14 hours of darkness every night and that is a long time in the dark. Around midnight we were getting gale warnings on the VHF and the SSB reports, great, that’s all we needed, however the speed we were sailing at we’d probably be in before it got too nasty. As it happened we rounded the bottom of Formentera at about 2am, 6 hours before we thought we would, so for the next 4 hours we did something we’ve NEVER done, we set the sails to spill as much wind as possible and I played with the Genoa for the next 3 hours trying to keep the boat under 5 knots. We didn’t want to go into Ibiza in the dark, it didn’t look a very friendly entry, even with that as we approached Mark turned around and went back out again for a couple of hours. The journey that should have taken us 23 hours, had we keep sailing at the speeds we could have would have only taken us around 18 hours. So we’re tucked up in Ibiza ahead of the gales and thankful for it.