The blog left us in the Northern Ionian and then suddenly Toodle-oo! is sold… what in the world happened???
Well, late in 2022, as we were heading towards Turkey for our winter berth, Laurie announced she was done with cruising! As one might expect, that led to some serious re-planning… We spent an interesting winter in Turkey and then come spring, made a bee-line towards Portugal, stopping in places we’d not visited before. Previous posts document our trip as far as Corfu in the northern Ionian… here’s the rest…
From Corfu, we headed up to Montenegro for a short visit – short because it’s coastline is pretty small but the mountains around Kotor are rather spectacular.
From Montenegro we moved on to Sicily. Our 350 mile crossing of the Adriatic to Sicily took 72 hours (27% with engine) including a short 5 hour stopover to wait for wind at the bottom of Italy’s boot. We arrived to the very sheltered natural harbor of Siracusa on the east coast of Sicily – which turned out to be a fantastic destination with very interesting architecture.
We were also reunited with Stefan and Anne on Mokendeist and again cruised with them. We took a car ride around Sicily and up to Etna to see the volcano – and after a horrible walk up were disappointed not to be able to get right to the Caldera.
We continued the eastward progress by sailing south(!) to Malta! We had such as marvelous visit to Valetta – a gorgeous old city with the most magnificent architecture – that we seriously considered moving there! The architecture is spectacular indeed.
However, a car rental allowed us to tour the whole island to find that it’s really only Valetta that’s the gem… scratch that moving idea!
We sailed out to the island off Matla, Gozo which has a wonderful anchorage and stayed there several days, waiting for weather to take us east to Sardinia.
Heading to Sardinia was proving difficult with forecast strong winds from the west, so we decided to head to an intermediate stop – Hammamet, Tunisia. Another country, another continent just an overnight passage away! On the way there we heard multiple radio exchanges about small overloaded and disabled boats with migrants searching out a better life – it all sounded rather dire. Fortunately none were encountered directly.
Tunisia was an interesting stop (including a visit to one of the Star Wars sets in the desert), but the place is filthy with a trash situation every bit as bad as India’s.
A weather window opened to make an almost direct passage to Menorca in the Balearics – with just an overnight stopover in southern Sardinia. The 190 mile overnight passage to Sardinia was all sailing – just motoring out of the anchorage (a brief stop to dive on the prop to remove some debris) and then motoring into the anchorage.
This was followed the next morning with a 270 mile passage to Menorca which was a mix of 25% motoring and 75% sailing, arriving in a favorite anchorage of Es Grau where Brendan and Brenda of catamaran ‘Lir’ joined us for several days.
We took several days sailing around the north east of Menorca to Adaia where Steve and Sue had rented an Airbnb for a week. It was great touring around the island in their rental car – especially bumping into a fascinating festival featuring Menorcan horses prancing around a crowded town square on their hind legs!
After Menorca we did an overnight sail to Formentera and just before arriving, met up with Jil and John on Moon Shadow who were heading in the opposite direction. We hadn’t seen them since Annapolis in 2017! We came alongside each other and while shouting greetings, dolphins came to play alongside us and between the boats! Magic!
We left Formentera for Motril – 312 miles – and (almost) completed the trip in 48 hours with only 8.5% engine. We used all the sails – multiple times and only averaged 5.5mph – but it was quiet! To avoid arriving in Motril at night we decided to shorten the trip and went into Almerimar instead – again meeting up with Stefan and Anne there. We intended only a couple of days there but in the end spent 5!
We did make it to Motril where we received a super friendly reception from the marina and where we met up with Dietmar who’s boat ‘Mermaid’ is on the hard there. Dietmar did us a huge favor storing our Monitor Windvane in his garage in Portimao.
We had a deadline to get to Gibraltar to meet Lois and Tom (Abigail’s in-laws) who would join us for a week but the weather was not cooperating – a single day with zero wind followed by a week of strong westerlies ☹
We took the no-wind day and motored the entire way to Gibraltar and as we got closer were dodging numerous tankers and cargo ships drifting around waiting to transit the straits. In view of the pitch-black night and the target rich environment, Laurie left me to handle the overnight passage until finally allowing me to get some sleep at 6:30am! At 7:45am the engine quit! ☹ We were right at Europa point – right in the middle of the traffic, drifting towards Morocco! Laurie reported that the engine died with a bang and a hiss – and there was an unusual lingering smell.
Turns out the exhaust mixing elbow (mixes engine exhaust with sea water) broke. It was a complete mystery to me as to why that caused the engine shut down – but I was glad that it had – or we’d have had sea water and soot all over the engine bay! Fortunately, we carry a spare elbow and exhaust hose and by 10:00am we were back underway. [We learned during a recent survey that our Halon fire extinguisher in the engine room had activated and was empty – it had shut down the engine when the elbow broke – phew!]
Before Tom and Lois arrived, we had some time to complete some things we’d not done – including walking the Mediterranean Steps and seeing the caves. We also got to meet up with some cruising buddies!
We had an excellent visit with Tom and Lois (in spite of their questionable politics 😉) and sailed with them from Gib to Barbate and then on to a favorite city, Cadiz.
We finished our sailing year with some lovely spinnaker sailing and stops in Ayamonte and Culatra where Laurie’s bestie, Sandra joined us, then on to Ferragudo and finally to our winter berth in Lagos.