Photo: Whimsical statue in Kyrenia, northern Cyprus, made entirely of recycled cans and bottles

First to catch everybody up: We rented out our house on Biltmore Street as of April Fools Day, and flew to Cyprus, to meet up with Wendy, a Brit who was sailing "Selinaris," her 38' Moody, from Dubai to cruise for the summer in the Mediterranean.

Art and I spent our first week in Cyprus with a rental car, driving from Larnaca, a beach town on the southern coast, to Kourion, an archaelogical site perched on a sheer bluff overlooking the Med, and then spent a couple of days in the lovely Troodhos Mountains, before meeting up with Wendy in Latchi on the west coast of Cyprus (north of Paphos). She and her crew had just brought the boat from Dubai, up the Red Sea, and through the Suez Canal. Her previous crew debarked, and Art and I are sailing with her for about a month, ending up in Rhodes, Greece, in May.

We set sail from Latchi after reprovisioning the boat and waiting a day for the sea to settle down after a huge blow. We couldn't tell the port authority in Latchi that we were heading to Kyrenia (aka Girne) since in their view northern Cyprus is an occupied territory and it's illegal to sail there. The southern part of Cyprus is an EU member, the currency is the Euro, and Greek is the lengua france (although English is widely spoken), and the religion is Greek Orothodox. The northern part of the island gets far fewer tourists, Turkish is the principal language, the currency is the Turkish lira, and it's largely Muslim. (Some people are optimistic that the Cyprus situation may finally be resolved since Turkey will have to give up its claim to northern Cyprus if it's to join the EU.)

Our first day of sailing on the Mediterranean was absolutely perfect -- a lovely breeze from behind us that kept us moving at 5 knots, sailing wing-and-wing (with both the mainsail and genoa extended far out, one on each side of the boat, to catch as much wind as possible). We arrived at the picture-perfect ancient harbor of Kyrenia overlooked by its Byzantine castle in time to get moored Med-style (stern to quay), clear through customs, and get a look at the old town.

While aboard Selinaris, we got lots of practice with Mediterranean-style mooring, where you dock perpendicular to the quay, typically just a fender's width from the boats on either side of you. To accomplish this, you drop your anchor about four boat-lengths out from the cement quay, then motor in reverse up to the jetty where you hope that somebody is prepared to catch your dock lines. This is a bit tricky since most sailboats, especially if there's a crosswind, don't easily back up in a straight line. Moreover, in a tight harbor, boats not infrequently end up with crossed anchor lines, which have to be sorted out when a boat dislodges a neighboring boat's anchor while pulling up its own.