On the 28th April, the kids would have been going back to school, and so this was to be their first day of home schooling… Enthusiasm was a little on the low side, but commitment from Mum got it afloat. Sal had arrived with a tonne of stuff from IGS designed to keep the kids on course. Combine this with Mathletics and other such literacy programs on the net plus reading at least a chapter a day to Dad and we are happy that they are probably getting more than they would at school. Not to mention, the new language, the food, the independence of being able to cycle into town, the sailing….
I was really concerned about the kids. How would they cope without friends? How would they entertain themselves while Sal and I got all this stuff done? Well, they are out of their skin. Once the schooling is out of the way, they’re off. Summer hardly knew how to ride a bike when we left Aus, we bought both her and Will a BMX and within a few days she was onto it. We have had a few interesting traffic incidents, particularly related to the fact that they drive on the other side of the road here. Some bumps and scrapes… in fact they both look like they live in a quarry, but we now spend so much time with them compared with being at home and they seem to be so content. Long may it last and Sal needs to be wrapped here, she is doing an amazing job.

Carol-Anne was joining us on the 30th, I was hoping my rego papers had arrived from Canberra by then so we could sail legally.... It took 11 days for the marking notes (change of name and home port etc) to get to Canberra from here!
Carol-Anne and Alan arrived on time at the Levkas bus station on Wednesday evening 30th April. We fed the kids, put them in front of a DVD and took Carol-Anne and Alan to our favourite restaurant in Levkas after cocktails nearby. More Greek food, lots of House wine, then another two litres on the house… and lots of laughs.
On the 1st May we woke to variable but acceptable weather, readied the boat for our very first independent sail and motored once more out of the narrow, shallow Levkas channel. On a good breeze we raised the main, unfurled the headsail and made 5.5 knots as we sailed north toward the mainland, tacked south to Nidri and enjoyed a near perfect mooring on Christo’s wharf for 15Euro and night, power and water included.
Four nights in Nidri with Carol-Anne and Alan was a blast. We decided to stay put as it was the weekend and no point going back to Levkas, so we asked them if they were happy to cab it back. It is only 17Ks by road and it meant one more night together. I had warned Sal and the kids that one feature of travel is you get t say goodbye a lot and so at 11:30 on the 4th May, we had our first taste of it…
We sailed back to Levkas in the mid-afternoon of the 5th, docked alongside at the Marina as we had paid up until the 11th thanks to a quirk in their pricing. The next day, the cushion covers, sailbag, helm cover and mooring rope bags arrived, but alas, still no registration papers!

On Friday the 9th May, Sally and Summer went on their daily ‘what can we buy today’ tours and to try the post office again on the very outside chance that the Boat Registration Certificate had arrived. We planned to meet at 1:30 for lunch at a yet untried seafood restaurant. I say yet untried because having spent a month or more in Levkas, we have tried them all, like 3 times! By the way, a really good meal for four with a half litre of white for me and half red for Sal always comes to between 40 and 50 Euro, so cooking is not high on our agenda. We met as planned and Sal announced that she had presents for everybody….
“Close your eyes” she said while placing something in front of me. “Now open them”… and there it was… The Registration Certificate! We cele-nebreated.

The following day, Phil picked me up at the hotel, we drove to the station where we met Capt. Will Miller and his dad Chuck fresh off the train from Charleston. Phil gave me all the winter wet weather gear I would need, and I really did need it. He gave us his car, which he would collect in Norwalk at some time in the coming weeks and off we went to rendezvous with said Catamaran.
The Catamaran now belonged to Kevin Santella (in the photo) who was kind enough to allow all this to happen. If you get to read this Kevin, regards to you and your family and thanks a million.

Dedicated to my sister Carol-Anne because she always laughs at my jokes….

This all started on Rebak Island, Malaysian June 2013 where we met a couple, Brian Taylor and Deborah Searle who looked healthy and happy, slim and a little weathered,. They had sold up everything to the consternation of their respective families, taken early retirement from teaching in Canada, bought a 35’ double ender and headed off down inland waters of the East Coast of America.

After doing the Caribbean they headed across to the Mediterranean, then through the Suez Canal. Trucked their boat across the desert from Akaba to Dubai to avoid the pirates of Somalia, down the gulf to India, the Maldives and in terrible conditions across to Malaysia where we met them. At that point it had taken them 12 years to do this and for them there was no real end in sight, they were having too good a time.

Having recently taken up big boat sailing with a quarter share in 40’ Jeanneau I felt inspiration coming on like it hadn’t done in a long time. I knew at that moment that whilst our life was as good as we could possibly ask for, we were in a comfort zone and I have never really been comfortable with comfort zones…

At this point, I was sporting a copy of ‘Sailing for Dummies’, given to me by one of the co-owners of our Jeanneau and gratefully accepted. It is a great book and whilst not exactly ego enhancing among seasoned yachties, it was the start of my ‘formal’ sailing education.

The inspiration fermented for a while until I mentally settled on a year in the Med on a catamaran. I shared these thoughts with Sally, my wife and mother of our two younger children, William (8) and Summer (7). Err, not exactly what she had in mind. I had felt that I would take a year or so o put together, aim to be I the Med for Spring 2015. She thought I’d wanted to sell the house and go the full Monty as the Canadians had done, sell everything and abandon our perfect world but after some discussion, a few days away for contemplation she was on board. In fact she was so on board that she didn’t want to wait until 2015, she wanted to be in the Med for spring 2014! Well, strike while the irons hot (whatever that means) I always say… well not always, in fact never but I will say it from now on….

And so the logistic mountain stood before us.

How do you buy a reliable second hand boat that is already in the Med without being ripped off? Who looks after the house when you’re gone for a year or two. What do you do with the cars, the dog, the mail, the older children, the job. How long will it take to get the relevant accreditations to sail in the Med and how much training is needed to do all this in adequate safety.

I told my Mom. If you come from Africa as I do, you say Mom, not Mum OK? She too is not the comfort zone kinda gal even at 83 years of age, but this one sat her down for a bit…. A couple of days later, she called to say, in her sometimes used, old lady’s voice that she had played Bridge with this woman who said that Catamarans were dangerous.. “Who is this woman Mum?” I asked disparagingly. “Um, Kay Kotie’s Mother” she replied.
For those of you who may not recall, Kay was the first woman to circumnavigate the globe single handed and unassisted….

“OK mom, you have my attention!”

So the research into why catamarans are dangerous began and if you Google anything to do with multihulls you’ll find that all roads lead to Phil Berman, CEO, the Multihull Company. I read everything there is to be read on the subject and came to the conclusion that they were indeed dangerous in early development, but now that they are in prolific production, they are only as dangerous as the skipper….. Err, that’ll be me!

Phil is everything multihull including being a broker. The deal with him is he will send you an extensive questionnaire to ascertain the perfect Cat for your requirements and then make some recommendations. If you sign with him, he will start the search, but if you happen find a boat on the net that you like the look of, do not contact that boat’s broker or directly request information on that boat. Leave that to Phil. He will source a Cat on the second hand market in the geography of your choice, provide a list of recommended surveyors, arrange the survey, handle the transaction, the flagging, the name change….. read, the mine field that is buying a boat on the other side of the World, and he will do this at no cost to you. You see, Phil makes his money by sharing the broker fee with the broker that you agreed not to contact but unlike that broker, Phil is operating on your behalf.

After checking out a few references, I signed with Phil at the end of July 2013, and that was the start of something quite unique.

Everything from this point went into overdrive. Thanks to Sally’s re-calibration of the timing for this event, we now planned to leave Australia at the end of January 2014…. That was less than 6 months away.
Sal was now totally into it. She started working on house rental, long term storage, car storage or rental, dog minding, older children resettling, younger children home schooling and the search for the perfect boat.
Step out of your comfort zone and it does amazing things for your relationship. You start operating as a team.

To gain a Certificate of Competency, which you will need if you want to sail in the Med, you need certain accreditations like Basic Keelboat Sailing, Coastal Cruising, Bareboat Cruising, Coastal Navigation and in my case, Cruising Catamaran sailing….

I hunted for any organisation that could provide the Catamaran piece, I figured if I could find such an outfit, I may as well do the lot with them. No such organisation exists in Australia.

Back to old mate Phil.

He had just the guy! Capt. Will Miller, owner of the Charleston Sailing School in South Carolina.

I contacted Will, he did indeed have a Cat in his fleet and so we co-ordinated the dates. He figured it would take a week of intensive training in Charleston Harbour and outside and so we settled on the week of the 19th to the 26th September. In the mean time I got started by completing the RYA Shore Based Day Skippers Course in early September.

I booked the flights through my sister, founder and CEO of Bay Travel, Melbourne… plug, plug, and we were all set…. Well, not quite. On the 29th August Capt. Will called to say that the Cat he had was on charter and the owner wanted it back. He had no other Catamarans in his fleet.

Back to old mate Phil.

“Do not cancel your flights Greg, I will find you a Catamaran, we can fly down to Fort Lauderdale, stay in my condo there and Will can come down and train you. Leave it to me, promise you will have a great experience.”
After a few Skypes involving possible boats to buy and trying to get the accreditation thing to gel, we came up with some new dates.. “You could fly in on the 25 October spend a couple of days getting over the jet lag, my wife Lynne is a senior director of the Philadelphia Eagles who are playing the New York Giants that weekend so you can come along and have the whole Americana experience…. good and bad. Then we could fly down to Fort Lauderdale, I could show you a range of boats so you can really make an informed choice on the type of boat to look for and Will can come down from Charlestown and get this training done!”

So, I changed my flights.

Two weeks before I was due to leave, I hadn’t heard a thing from either Phil or Will so I emailed Phil asking if anything had gelled regarding my training.

In true Phil style, “I have just sold an Ausie built Lightwave 38 catamaran in Norwalk, Connecticut and it needs to be delivered to Charleston, South Carolina. Capt. Will is a Delivery Captain, so he can do the delivery, you can go along and do your training en route and the owner gets a free delivery…. How does that sound?”

“Freaking awesome Phil! “

I really wanted an offshore experience in a Catamaran. I wanted to know what not to do in big seas in order to avoid the ‘position of highest stability’ ie; upside down and I hoped that this was going to be just that!
So, on the 25th October I flew to Philadelphia, met Phil and Lynne and went to the game.

Well... Americans sure know how to put on a sporting event. Starting in the car park where this shot was taken. Vehicles ranging from your standard 4x4s to massive RVs with television screens I didn’t even know existed bolted to the sides of them. BBQ’s cooking every kind of animal and beer, so many varieties of beer and so much of it. So friendly, generous and hospitable…

In the photo that is Phil Berman on the far right and this is the pre-game Tailgate Party… and it was freezing!

These guys are fanatical supporters of their team. They will never miss a match. They have a permanent parking space at their home ground for the tailgate party, Most sleep overnight in their RV’s at the ground and the Eagles had not won a home match all season. Anticipatory would understate the mood.. “Don’t stress” I told them, “I’ll bring you some luck… I’m on a roll!” Yeah!
They had their worst game of the season, the only touchdown being scored by the defence when New York fumbled a punt…. So much for that ‘roll’ Greg.