It's been a really long time since I have posted a blog (even for me!).  The last you heard I was in the Barcelona with Seabird. After that it got kind of routine and I did not feel that I had anything too exciting to report. Barcelona was kind of the highlight of that cruising season. We did finally get together with the old GSSR group. It was fun meeting up with Ken and Roberta on Sans Souci and Braun and Tina aboard Ocean Pearl. We all wished we could have cruised a bit together but we had di...

The first thing I need to say is that there is a huge difference between visiting a city and living there. If we 'visit' any city for, even, two weeks, we spend nearly every moment touring sites, eating at restaurants or sleeping. Don't get me wrong.  We love doing that and we have done that quite a bit. Living there, to us, is much more enjoyable because you proceed at much less of a hurried pace and you get to know the people and surroundings in a more intimate fashion. After our scheduled m...

At this point we were getting fairly excited about Barcelona.  We started planning for it months ago. It started with our search on the Internet to find a suitable a berth for the boat for two weeks. Carol and I are both pretty handy on the web, so it did not take us long to find a website of some sort of a broker for marinas in the Med. Their website had an easy form to fill out and within a few seconds, we had pricing (gulp) for our two week stay. I knew Barcelona would be expensive, but $1500...

Point number 7 is where our first stop was and we then continued on to Calle de Sant Vicenc, point number 13. How we hated to leave Mahon!  It is such a nice friendly place with warm, friendly people and lots of interesting places to explore in town. Here is the thing:  it may seem that because we have a 4 month or so cruising season, we should be able to spend a long time at each place we visit. The Med, however, is a very big place with hundreds of potential stops. Add to that our plans to sp...

We will really miss the food and the people of Italy. We struggled a bit with the language, but probably because we never put the effort into learning it like we did learning Spanish. I possibly know (or knew) more Japanese than Italian, which is sad, because I am half Italian! I have found, though, to get along in any country, if you can learn maybe, 20 verbs and 100 nouns, along with some common phrases, you will get along just fine. We have also found that in most countries, many people know ...

Chart of our cruise from Sicily to Sardinia I am always a bit anxious about our first overnight trip of the season and I am not quite sure why. With our array of instruments, including 2 radars, 4 GPS, AIS, night vision and depth finders, it is as safe as cruising during the day. The issue is that you don't get much sleep. If you are on a 5 or 6 day passage, you get into kind of a rhythm. We normally do 3 hour shifts at the helm from 6 pm until 6 am. After a few days, you develop the ability t...