Picking up where we left off
19 October 2017 | Cid Harbour, Whitsunday Island, Queensland, Australia.
Annie and Cam "H"
The summer down under had come to an end for us, it was April 2014 and it was time to return for our third and final season sailing on Annecam in the Mediterranean, time for us to live another summer and to never see another winter. We both had resigned from our jobs, for me it was time to take all the accrued annual leave and my pay slips finished when the leave finished. This would be the last time we worked in Australia.
It seemed like no time had passed and we were back on board getting Annecam ready for the next part of our journey sailing back to Australia. Our flights back to Sicily took less time as there was hardly any back tracking and less time flying is always a good thing.
We flew from Melbourne to Dubai, Dubai to Rome, Rome to Catania. The only issue we had was our flight landed in Catania too late to catch the bus to Licata where Annecam was located. We had to stay in a Bed & Breakfast for the night before catching the bus to Licata the next morning, I might add this B&B was a beautiful Castle, complete with outbuildings, gardens and grounds that only the Sicilians/Italians would have. The owner of the castle told us that a high ranking German Officer and his staff occupied the building during the second world war and the Allies blew the place apart by aerial bombing trying to remove the German Officer. After the war the family rebuilt it piece by piece, stone by stone, completely restoring it to its former splendor.
Once back on Annecam we discovered that the world’s highest active volcano, Mount Etna had covered everything topside with raw potash, turning our clears into not-so-clears and the stainless steel was almost black but with a lot of elbow grease, we managed to make the stainless shinny again but the poor old clears stayed the same all the way back to Australia. We also discovered a part on the water-cooled exhaust required replacing on our motor, once this was done we said see you later to all our friends in Sicily and set sail for Malta.
The first sail for the new season was a case of motoring almost all the way due to the lack of wind, there was a left over swell out of the east, it was being generated by a weather system not that far from Israel, about one thousand miles away. Without the breeze it was a rock and roll passage. The combination of the rough seas along with the very first sail of the season plus the farewell drinks from the night before with our friends in the Marina de Carla del Sole, Annie was slightly ill, at one stage we had a large playful pod of dolphin on our bow, I was standing up forward filming these beautiful animals and when I called out to Annie to see if she would like to come up and watch them to get her mind of the sea sickness, she told me to go somewhere else and I won’t write what she really said on here
Our first stop for a couple of nights was Gozo, after clearing in and completing the formalities we played tourist and took one of the hop-on hop-off busses around the Island. Our next stop was Valletta on the main Island of Malta, it was one of the most majestic harbour entrances we have ever been in, the ancient fortifications lining the entrance were something else. We had booked Annecam into the Manual Island Yacht Yard to be hauled out for a fresh coat of anti-foul and to check all our running gear making sure she was ready for our Atlantic Ocean crossing the following year. We did have a bit of fun retrieving the tax component that we should not have payed from this yard and after a lot of discussion about what a foreign flagged ship is, a ship that is in transit. It was refunded before we left.
At the time we were subject to Schengen that only allows us to stay for a maximum of ninety days on our foreign passports, from the time we entered the Schengen area. As we wanted to stay on the right side of the authorities we cleared out of Schengen in Malta and sailed to Tunisia. On this passage we anchored on Lampedusa Island to break the passage to two short hops, for those that don’t know Lampedusa is the offshore detention Island used by the Italians for the illegal immigrants that try to cross the Mediterranean from north Africa.
After our overnight stop on Lampedusa we completed the overall passage to Yasmine Hammamet in the North African country of Tunisia, we remember this passage well as we had storm after storm complete with more lightning and thunder than any sailor could wish for and lightning is never a good thing while on a yacht with a tall aluminum mast, pardon the pun but it could be a shocking experience, not to mention what a lightning strike would do to all our electronics. Another reminder of the day as we entered Tunisian waters, it was Annie’s birthday. I remember standing up on the bow saying to Annie, welcome to Yasmine Hammamet and I give you Tunisia for your birthday.
We were also met by sinister looking pirate ships as we entered the port, lucky for us they were replicas of the Barbary Pirate ships, just for the tourists to go out for a day sail on.
After we cleared through Customs and Immigration we were allocated a berth right on the town quay, we couldn’t get over the number of locals and tourists that would stand on the back of Annecam to have their photos taken. We had no idea that this was also the location that Hannibal launched the invasion against the Roman Empire from, I’m sure that most of you reading this would have heard of Hannibal and his army complete with elephants marching over the Alps taking the Romans by surprise. There were monuments celebrating this great military leader in the middle of the city. It was also the location where the movie Star Wars was filmed. We had absolutely no idea about any of this history until after we arrived.
We only stayed in Tunisia for a week before we set sail to Villasimius, Sardinia. This was one of the toughest sails we had done since starting out in Croatia, it all started out okay, that was until a storm front started chasing us down complete with a water spout, we were hardly clear of this nasty weather system and we had a local fishing boat trying to cut us off as we think that they thought that we were going to sail through their nets. They kept shouting to us in Arabic, the same words over and over, getting louder and more aggressive each time, they expected us to understand as they kept saying it again and again, they almost rammed us at one point in the exchange, once they realized that we were nowhere near their fishing nets they tried to give us cans of tuna as a piece offering, we had a laugh as we waived them goodbye.
It was getting dark as we sailed past the Isles Cani light house just off the north-east coast of Tunisia and just after the light house was the very busy shipping separation zone with all the commercial traffic coming and going between the Straits of Gibraltar and the Sues Canal, this was a very stressful part of this passage but the best was yet to come.
There is a wind that blows down through the Rhone valley on the French/Spanish border out into the Gulf of Lion and down across the Mediterranean Sea called a Mistral, it is one of the well-known nasty weather events that has the ability to upset the big commercial ships let along a sailing yacht trying to make way into the growing seas. It was a case of reduce our sail area and batten down our hatches and hang on as Annecam kept racing off the breaking waves and crashing into the next. It was at about this time of the passage that Annie started turning a lighter shade of green and she stayed below hugging her newest best friend, the bucket. Forty-one hours this passage took from start to finish, I was a very tired skipper by the time we were safely anchored on Sardinia, I was tired to the point of hallucinating about top marks on fish farms that were not even there.
It was at this time we notified the authorities that we were a ship in transit eliminating the requirement to have to go through Customs and Immigration as we would have been in breach of Schengen, we stayed as a ship in transit all the way to Gibraltar.
The real highlight in this season for us sailing on Annecam was not just the places we stopped at, not just the history that revealed itself to us but all the people we met and spent time with, we would run out of ink trying to name them all on here. We still stay in touch with most of these people and if you keep following us we are sure you will get to meet them as they sail their own journey, their own adventure as most of them will stop here in Australia to say hello, as they circumnavigate this amazing world on their own yachts.
To be continued……..
The photo is one of the Barbary Pirate ships that came out to meet us as we entered the port.
“Three things you cannot recover in life: the WORD after it’s said, the MOMENT after it’s missed and the TIME after it’s gone. Be Careful!”