07/Sept/2015

After a two month long stay in Malta which we thoroughly enjoyed most of the time on a mooring in Marsaxlokk Harbor. Sometimes moving around from one anchorage to another. My preferred anchorage is just below the Mnajdra Temple north of Wied Iz Zurieq with crystal clear water and white sand bottom, great place for scuba diving and snorkling. The down side to this is that you will have to check the weather as it could be untenable at times.

We left on a good weather window towards Monastir early morning before the sun pooped over the horizon, and headed east with full mainsail and genoa, with a wind on the aft quarter stayed like this all the way to Monastir except for the overnight that we had to start the engine to keep us going at least 5 kts of speed. It took us 32.3 hrs to cover the 173 nm distance at an average speed of 5.4 kts.

We are now enjoying North Sardinia (Costa Smeralda) for the our second time here. We had a wonderful leg from Monastir to Villasimius Sardinia we covered the 233 nm in 44.25 hrs. We motored sailed up the coast in two 10 hour days and we have been pattering around this  beautiful part of the Mediterranean ever since. The weather has been great although we had some strong winds but no problem around here there is always a fantastic bay to anchor in with a windward shore.

We had a bit of a mishap here on the way to the Coast Guard station Lillian tripped and injured herself so we are staying in Golfo Aranci till she gets better.The worst part is a shoulder bruise that does not look very good and doesn’t feel any better. So I will take good care of her here till she get better, doctors do not thing there is any broken bones but was advised to keep her arm in a sling.

These  Google Earth photos are some of the anchorages we have visited.

In mid September we decided to head down to Arbatax as we could not find a good enough weather window to do a straight run to Marina di Ragusa from NW Sardinia, during the previous weeks and days leading to this decision we looked at many grib files and noticed a definite pattern, when the NW winds blow it wraps around both the NW and the SW becoming northerly and southerly respectively then stops leaving a 25 nm gap of clean weather with light winds around Arbatax all the way to Marsala Sicily. We need this type of weather as we didn’t want to get into heavy seas with Lillian injury which by the way was X-Rayed and found to be a upper humerus fractured. Therefore we left Arbatax Sardinia  on the 25th Sept 2015, we hoisted the full main and motored out of the anchorage in a light  NW breeze, further out we found some nasty swells coming from the NE and the NW some as high as 2 meters these are created from the NW high winds and some other storm close to Genoa Italy I was a little concerned with Lillian having use of only one hand but by 17:00 things started to settle down and Lillian managed to handle herself very well. The first night was nice and the next morning was calm we had the mainsail up all the time and when we reached between the Egadi islands at the western end of Sicily the wind picked up so we opened the genoa and turned the engine off sailing downwind making 4 knots at best but the sun was bright and we were very happy to have made this decision. The following night we motored along the southern coast of Sicily , the next morning we could see familiar landmarks, the sea was calm with just a light breeze from the NE. We arrived at our winter spot at 14:00 on 27th Sept after 54 hrs from our departure. We also caught a load of fish mainly tuna, it was too much for us so we gave a lot of it to friends.