The Italian man who went to Malta

Hello everyone!

A lot of things have happened since our last blog post: we went to Malta and back to Sicily!

Our sail to Malta was rather short (around 16 hours) as we started from the east coast of Sicily. A big highlight of this sail was that we saw whales very close to the boat!!!

We arrived in Malta at night and only discovered the beauty of our anchorage in the morning:

After a day of discovering the area near the anchorage with a bit of climbing, we had to move to a harbour to shelter from stronger winds. We spent two days at a harbour of Valletta and took the opportunity to visit the city and do some fixes on the boat. Valletta was very different from any other city we’d ever visited, with unique mix of Arabic and western influence rendering it very unique!

We then decided to move to an anchorage on a western island of the Maltese archipelago and wait there for our trip back to Sicily. But on the way to this western anchorage, the winds were so nice that we decided to just continue to Sicily straight away! Unfortunately, the winds didn’t stay that perfect during the entire trip and the sail ended up being a bit slower than what we were used to: it took us 48h to sail about 400 km… but this also means that the trip was not too tiring so it was really nice nevertheless 🙂 A highlight of this sail was that the Italian customs stopped us at sea and asked to see our documents. We had to hand them our IDs and boat papers via a comically big landing net. We were slightly scared of loosing all our documents to the sea…but all went well!

We are now in San Vito lo Capo (Sicily) which is an absolute climbing paradise with over 1000 climbing routes right by the sea and overall marvelous landscapes:

We’ll spend the next couple of days here doing some climbing and hiking 🙂

For the next step, we plan on doing the crossing of the Tyrrhenian sea to Sardinia. This would be one of the big 4 crossings with, at most, 140 km from the nearest land. So far the earliest start date seems to be next Friday, but the wind forecasts could easily change by then so we’ll keep an eye on it!