We are in wind down mode as we come to the end of our 3 months on board and took the opportunity to take Al Shaheen a few miles up the coast of Corfu to Agni. We’d been to this bay last year by car with our friends Ian and Jo who live here and they’d introduced us to Toulas restaurant by the waterside. It was outstanding and it seemed only right to go there for lunch. As you can see the food is to an incredible standard and not like any waterfront taverna I’ve ever been to before. This was the irresistible desert we shared after an excellent meal.

Unusually for this area, the wind got up in the afternoon so we were pleased to be back on board as our mooringnin the northern end of the bay became increasingly uncomfortable so we let go our long lines to the shore and let the boat simply swing on her by now well embedded anchor. All held fine till breakfast time today when a >20 knot gust dislodged us and we started to drag our anchor. The forecast ain’t too special for the next 48 hours so we had a great but short sail back to Gouvia marina to seek shelter for a day or two. We expect rain tomorrow which is outrageous obviously. Our arrival back in Gouvia was far from easy as we had to moor Mediterranean style with a 15 knot crosswind, this being far from Al Shaheen’s sweet spot. After 3 attempts we got safely tied up but I managed to lightly scrape the stern in the process so Nicky’s has got into action with various strong smelling epoxy products to patch up the battle scar.

Cian leaves us tonight to head back to Ireland and we will miss his amazing and endless supply of good humour and witticisms.

Over the next few days we will head south to Lefkas and meet up with Sail Ionian who will take care of the boat till next year. Then we can start planning our Greek sailing for 2019. Any takers?

It took a lot of planning and prep but here we are in Greece. From Gosport via Azores, Gibraltar, Cartagena and Bizerte in Tunisia, we arrived in Greece to make landfall in Lakka on the island of Paxos on Saturday morning 1st Sept. This has been a personal odyssey for Nicky and me and has been all we had hoped for. Massively enjoyable, stretching our boundaries, building our seagoing confidence and ultimately just incredibly satisfying and rewarding. We can now look forward to exploring the eastern Med on our own boat over the next few years.

Along the way many have helped and now might be the time to say thank you. Our family have all been hugely supportive despite having inevitable concerns about the wisdom of middle aged parents setting off into the Atlantic for the first time. Your support and encouragement has been appreciated at every step so thank you nearest and dearest. Sadly my Mum died before we set off so was not alive to follow us on the blog which I know she’d have done to see the results of all the hours of preparation she saw us do over the winter. Nicola’s Mum is also no longer with us but would have enjoyed our adventure and taken pride in seeing us achieve our goals. We have one of her pictures up in the saloon of Al Shaheen so we think of her daily.

Our home and pets have been very ably cared for by Tony and Marukh McDonald and we are hugely grateful to them for all their help in making it possible to walk out of the front door for 3 months and know everything and everyone was in safe hands. Thank you both you have become valued friends and we hope to see you again next year.

John and Jenny Franklin, former owners of Al Shaheen have been incredibly supportive, and of course John was on board for most of the voyage, only leaving us once we got to Cartagena. For their advice, support and generosity, thank you.

We have had the privilege of getting to know new crew with Bernard Mitchell coming with us westwards to the Azores and Cian Gallagher joining us in Cartagena. To you both, thank you for your friendship, your humour and for sharing your knowledge and experience.

My colleagues at work have had to cover for my 3 months away and deserve some holiday themselves. I thank you and look forward to letting you have some well deserved rest of your own.

We’re already starting to plan our 2019 cruise and look forward to many years exploring Greece and beyond.

This scene caught my eye as we were about to have lunch today. We use the 3 Health Management drinking flasks to keep water with us especially on hot days like this. Thank you HML, these are proving extremely useful.

The bread was baked on board this morning by me - my previous first attempt failed badly and had to be rescued by Nicola but I did better today!

As we have had almost zero wind, the engine has propelled us all the way from Cartagena via Tunisia where last filled up. We are all looking forward to arrival, all being well on Saturday in Paxos and turning off the noisy engine. Yachts are much nicer to be on when sailing than motoring.

We have enormous diesel tanks (350L) but no yacht can carry on for ever so we’ve carried an extra 75L in Jerry cans kept in a locker. Today we needed to decant all that into the main boat tank and the best way is with our “worry tube” as Cian calls it. This device has a ball valve in one and and this allows a siphon to be started and so the Jerry cans are emptied into the tank below.

The glassy smooth sea in this pic tells you there’s no wind and why we have need to refuel en route

Next stop - Paxos

We’ve now clocked up over 4,000 miles since we left Gosport on 2nd June. This turns out to be about 10% of the Mike’s covered by Al Shaheen in her previous 17 years so she has been worked hard. Of that, we’ve had to use the motor for around 500 hours, so about 21 days. In fact, the 300 plus mikes from Cartagena has been entirely motoring or motor sailing.

This morning we rounded the SE corner of Sicily hoping to see Mt Etna as we altered course to 056 degrees and began our leg north east towards Corfu. Lots of cloud over the coast meant that sadly we did not see this Sicilian icon.

As we’d headed East along the Sicilian coast we had to keep clear if a huge number of fishing boats and fish pots (usually just possible to see their floating marks by day but no chance at night so always a worry for the night watchkeepers). We also had 2 offshore wellheads for gas fields so kept well away from those of course.

As we motored on towards our landfall of Corfu where we will need to do entry paperwork to keep the boat in Greece for the time being we sweltered on a particularly hot and humid day with no wind. We did treat ourselves to a stop and drift swim at the 6pm watch change which coincided with the once per day engine shut down for routine checks. Nicky then served up a delicious pasta with Rocquefort walnut and chorizo sauce. In the Bezirte supermarket, Cian had managed to find something for pud last night that was somewhere between creme brûlée, yoghurt and custard but was delicious. Tonight we debated healthy fresh fruit as an option but very soon settled on chocolate for “afters” so a dip into the by now refrigerated ship chocolate stores was required. Enjoyed by all.

Into the night and as yet no moon (now waning) so it’s properly dark meaning we have the most amazing view of the stars and the Milky Way. On a clear night like this, an uninterrupted sunset over the Sicilian coast and a starscape such as we have tonight is pure beauty. Nature is awe inspiring and I love watching and being part of its rhythms every day we’re at sea.
Mark

As expected the weather continued to make onward passage towards Greece unattractive with big seas and strong winds forecast. Given that we’d motored non stop from Cartagena we needed to fill our by now nearly empty diesel tanks and Tunisian diesel is meant to be cheap. We headed in to Bizerte on the Tunisian coast somewhat unsure what to expect. Anyone who’s sailed with us knows how we like our rely on our pilot books to tell us what each port has to offer and to give a heads up on any likely navigational issues getting in. As we had really not expected to be dropping in on Africa, was we came armed with only our 14 year old pilot bought as part of a second hand job lot of charts of the Med. The Almanac did reassure us of a new marina so needing a port of i we arrived late on Sunday night. The navigation was far from easy with a big sea and 25 knot gusts making our approach rather faster than ideal. We were not helped by various navigational lights not working (the pilot did warn of this) and some very prominent fixed green lights ashore just where there should have been a navigational light. Although the charts of the area are reported to be very inaccurate actually they weren’t and so our chart plotter gave considerable reassurance when we were not 100% sure of what we were seeing.

We were met at the pontoon mooring by helpful night staff who then hung around after we tied up so we realised he was expecting his baksheesh which we duly provided.

We’d expected that ‘formalities’ might be complex and we weren’t disappointed. We were told the Police would need to come on board and they arrived in great spirits after an hour or so. We were really keen to reward ourselves with a “we’ve arrived safely drink” but thought smelling of alcohol when greeting the Police in this very Muslim country was not a good plan.

They made themselves at home in our saloon and spread out a number of papers we needed to complete. They could not have been more friendly but as we were to find out over the next 36 hours, everything is made to be bureaucratic slow and complex. It is hard to get angry as we found every Tunisian to be utterly delightful and really helpful.

Our passports were eventually taken away to be stamped and we were given our prizes, shore passes”, the prized documents that meant we could leave the marina. Despite it being 1 am they told us where we could get a meal if we wanted. We didn’t!

We eventually had our tipple, congratulated ourselves on arriving on another continent and slept very very soundly on a boat that was nice and still!

Our morning started with the lady from customs. We knew she’d want to inspect the boat and we had not been misled. However she looked at our gangplank and was not sure she could make it aboard. She summoned up her courage, boarded and started to have a look around. Perhaps we all smelled terrible, perhaps she felt uncomfortable with 2 men (I did reassure her my wife was asleep in the forward cabin) but her inspection was a tame affair. I had to count how many bottles of alcohol and show her where it was stored. She lost interest in the detail very soon once she accepted that we had no firearms and no cellarfulls of alcohol. We had disposed of a large number of our stock of syringes and needles from our medical stores earlier as we were worried it might be misinterpreted.

The marina itself was completed 2 years ago and is huge. A good bit of it remains incomplete and I fear that unless they generate substantial business from superyachts the enterprise will decay and look pretty down at heel in a short time like so much of the infrastructure we saw.

Our sojourn in Tunisia was full of bureaucracy but we really enjoyed it. Most transactions are in cash so we had to get ourselves some Tunisian Dinars. The few ATM’s I found seemed all to be “hors service” so we queued in a bank and eventually were allowed some cash in exchange for the rather fortuitous £20 notes in my wallet.

Armed with real local currency we headed off for a much overdue breakfast which became lunch. We thought we were too late for the main fish market held every morning near the fishing port but not so. On our travels we stumbled upon a basic but busy street restaurant with the proprietere cooking fresh fish on a large grill on the street outside. We liked the simple charm of the place and asked if we could have a table (my very rusty schoolboy French was by now proving useful). Yes came the answer but where is your fish he asked? Clearly it was a BYO fish place. We went back into the fish market, chose 3 nice looking Dorado and returned for our food to be cooked. It proved to be the best meal in ages. Served with delicious local salads and chips of course the fish was seasoned with some sort of local concoction, once grilled the fish were Uber tasty. The whole meal cost under £20 for the 3 of us.

Our afternoon saw us exploring on foot and Bizerte was interesting. Certainly it felt rather more Africa than Europe, Arabic being the main language and women dressed in traditional clothing. Equally, this was a former French territory so that influence is writ large everywhere and it made communication possible as my French is much better than my Arabic.

We found our way into the old town, the Medina I believe it’s referred to. Narrow streets and life felt pretty basic for its inhabitants. Feral cats wherever you looked plus the occasional hen and surprisingly some dogs. Sadly, though, litter was strewn everywhere and never more had I thought how much damage we do with plastic. Avoiding cat poo was tricky and drainage “issues” were not a rarity!

We found a mosque being faithfully restored and if I understood the builder correctly I believe it dated back to pre Roman times. He reckoned with the usual confidence of a builder that it would open for prayer in 6 months; I’m not so sure. He took us proudly into every room, showed us the baths and wash rooms and the beautiful main part of the mosque with vaulted brick ceilings and a view over the fishing harbour to Mecca. We were lucky I think to be allowed in.

Our evening was back in the old port near the fishing boats where we had fish once again and were joined by a French decorator visiting his mate the restaurant owner. Once he established I could speak passable francais he wanted to show me his family snaps. Fortunately our meal arrived in the nick of time before my eyes glazed over.

Check out was not smooth and the formalities, all taken very seriously, seemed to take forever. We now have Tunisian entry and exit stamps, very smart, in our passports and warm impressions to take away of a chaotic but fascinating place full of what happy and absolutely lovely people.

As they say, “A la prochaine fois”