That’s a significant moment for us: we have reached half of our journey!

We had friends of Louis (Andreas and Petr) joining us for a week on Misty Sea and sailing along the Spanish south coast. After a week of sailing, Star Wars quotes, and deceived hopes of catching a fish, they left us at Almeria, aka the second warmest city in Europe. To celebrate this awesome week, we were invited to a fancy restaurant which reminded us that, outside of the wild sailing life, the civilized world still went on.

Still struggling with the lack of wind, we left directly afterward, seizing, what seemed to be, a perfect weather window to go directly to Gibraltar. We would then cover as much distance in 36h as in the last 3 weeks! The med being the med, this turned into 12h of perfect conditions followed by 24h of no winds and motor-sailing. We also had to slalom through the huge traffic of cargo ships which came from the strait of Gibraltar.

Arriving at Gibraltar means not only reaching the iconic connection between the mediterranean sea and the Atlantic Ocean but also the half of our journey, distance-wise and time-wise! That also means a lot of differences in our Sailing fashion: the return of tides and currents, reliable weather forecasts, and the end of backward parking in harbors (although we were finally getting used to it).

It turns out that Gibraltar is an unexpected jewel! This bit of land belonging to the UK is, of course, truly interesting for its situation and how the city evolved around it, but also offers a lot of historical attractions as well as natural wonders: it’s a flat stretch of land with a massive rock rising in its center, home to a jungle-like forest and the famous Macaques of Gibraltar… Yes, the UK is the only European country home to wild Macaques! Last but not least, you’ll be glad to hear that clichés exist for a reason, and, of course, the British territory of Gibraltar is notorious for… its relatively cold and humid weather 😀

Although we would not have expected it, now comes the greatest dangers of the trip: Orcas attacks… I know it sounds like a cheap scenario for Jaws 4, but it turns out that, since 2020, Orcas have started to frequently attack monohulls of less than 15m (glad to fit someone’s criteria ^^). Here’s an article about the situation. Although they never attack humans directly, they obsess over breaking the rudder off of sailboats… not a pleasant scenario either.

We tried to prepare as much as possible for this scenario and will try to move to Faro on Friday the 17th, reaching then Portugal. If the orcas let us through, it’s not sure that the winds will ^^

There we should meet with a colleague of Louis and then our next appointment should be on the 3rd of July, in Lisbon or Porto to meet friends from Munich. Although it looks so far like we could easily get there, Portugal has unfortunately dominant winds going southward, opposite to our travel direction. Nevertheless, we should probably be there on time 🙂

Hello everyone! During the last week, we didn’t get much wind to move forward towards Gibraltar. But we seized pretty much every hour of decent wind and moved along the Spanish coast slowly and in rather slow steps.

When there was no wind, we did some scuba diving, played some beach volleyball with locals, visited Alicante or went for hikes 🙂

Sailing rather slowly also allowed us to fully appreciate how ugly the constructions along the coast are here and how beautiful every other coast on the trip has been so far!

When arriving in Alicante, we noticed a particularly ugly building, which we discovered later was designated as being the ugliest building in Spain! It’s the triangular building on the right side of the picture below:

We’re currently sailing with two friends who are staying with us for a week. They didn’t know what they were getting into as it is their first sailing experience, but luckily… They can’t escape the boat until we go into the next harbour!

Although the wind forecasts keep changing, right now, it looks like we’ll get some really good winds to move at least to Malaga between Thursday and Sunday. We really hope that the current wind forecast gets confirmed!!

The thermometer rises, the day stretches, the tourist crowd grows and the winds fade…  that’s it, the summer has begun!

Hello everyone, this time we’re on time for the weekly update! At the time of the last one, we were still in the Balears with Louis’ parents. This was the first time we had people joining us for a couple of days, and it was great to meet familiar faces again. After some heartbreaking goodbyes, we sailed off to Mainland Spain while Louis’ parents stayed in Ibiza to wait for their return flight and, of course, enjoy a few more hours of the crazy party life of the island 😉

During their stay, we had our first attempts at free diving in clear water and absolutely loved it. Given the right location, it’s like swimming in an aquarium. Alongside climbing and discovering local culture, this will become a new activity we’ll be looking for in the coming anchorages.

In the last days, we’ve really felt a shift in the rhythm of the journey, as the summer season takes off. On the plus side, the warmer temperature makes life much more comfortable (no more night sailing with skiing gloves and 4 layers of clothes) and it’s nice to see places come to life as the tourism takes off. So far we’re not yet at a point where there are too many tourists or too hot a temperature. However, the wind patterns also changed significantly: whereas at the beginning we were waiting for calm weather windows to travel and hoping that winds were not stronger than forecasted (we did get caught in some unpleasant storms), we’re now in the opposite situation! We are often blocked at anchorages because there can be days at a time with no winds at all and are sometimes stuck in the middle of a trip because we don’t have winds to move any further (God bless the inventor of the engine, but we try to use it as little as possible ^^).

It’s anyway better to fear no winds than to fear a storm and we can adapt. During the coming days, we’ll have to make shorter trips using the thermal winds that come for a few hours in the hot afternoons in order to make it to our next appointment: we will meet some friends in Cartagena. In terms of trajectory, it’s pretty straightforward now as we’ll be following the coast for the next few months 🙂

Have a good week!

Good evening everyone! This blog post is long overdue but we’ve been very busy with crazy partying in Mallorca and Ibiza (nope!)…

After spending a few days at the idyllic anchorage in the north of Mallorca shown in our last post, we moved further south along the Mallorcan coast to Cala Figuera. It’s a small town surrounding a natural bay and we were lucky to stay in the middle of the fisher harbor at a buoy:

Conveniently, Cala Figuera is also next to multiple climbing spots right by the sea! Due to the heatwave, we had to adopt the Spanish rhythm: we started the days early with a bit of climbing while the sun was still bearable then spent our afternoons swimming and napping and went for nice walks in the evening. That’s also where we first had a friend joining, but only for a day this time 😉

We then got a chance to verify all the cliches about party tourism in Mallorca (spoiler: they were all confirmed!) by spending a few days in Palma where we met Louis’ parents who are visiting for a week. But surprisingly, Palma has a very charming and lively city center and also a refreshing deep water soloing spot right by the city!

The trip to Ibiza was our chance to test out the boat with four people on board. We had Louis’s parents joining us during the night sail and had for the first time to bring our storage room back to its original purpose: a proper cabin… and it turns out we can fit a bike in our closet if necessary ^^

Our star seems to still be shining as the conditions of the sail were once again very pleasant – better than forecasted!

We are now going to be until Saturday in Ibiza (as always until the winds let us move further), doing our usual life: boat work, hiking/climbing, and visiting. Then we’ll move to mainland Spain but this time, we’ll be alone again for the next journey.

Our next appointment is in Cartagena (or Almeria) on the 5th of June. Hopefully, we should manage it just fine! We now have a weather window to cross the 75 nm to mainland Spain (~20h) and we then need winds to travel about 100 nm in 6 days to be on time for meeting our friends there 🙂

Oh no wait, we’re actually in Mallorca.. but isn’t that nearly the same??

We’ve reached the Balearic Islands a few days ago! The crossing from Sardegna went extremely well! The main difficulty we encountered in earlier crossings was that tough conditions rendered the sailing extremely tiring: since we’re only two people, each of us spends half of the night awake while the other tries to sleep – which is rather difficult with strong winds or high waves… But during our trip to the Balearic Islands, the conditions were perfect. There were no waves at all and just enough wind to move forward sufficiently fast to do the journey in 48hours without being too tired 🙂 And that was it, our last big sea crossing! From now on, our journey will take us alongside the coast up to northern Europe which also means a lot more flexibility since we are much less dependent on long, safe, weather windows to travel.

Our first stop in the Balearic archipelago was Minorca, where we stayed near Mahon, the hometown of Mayonnaise (too bad we both don’t like Mayonnaise…), and the capital of Menorca. We spent two days there, visiting this charming old town, and the fortress of la Mola right beside our anchorage.

Yesterday, we spent the day at sea sailing to Mallorca. After two months of very bad amateurish fishing, and a few attempts of improvement we finally managed to catch a fish… and what a fish! A 3 kg Bluefin Tuna. Sara is proudly walking in the steps of her grandfather 🙂 We also named our new companion Konrad, after the gentleman who ramed his anchor into our boat hull during his departure maneuver and then left without a word ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We’re currently on the northeast side of Mallorca, where we want to spend a few days climbing and hiking. This is basically what our anchorage looks like from the top of one of the climbing routes so there’s really nothing to complain about:

We’re planning on staying in Mallorca for at least another week as we’re meeting some family and friends in Palma in a week’s time. From there, we’ll sail towards the Spanish mainland, potentially via Ibiza or Formentera. We’ll then follow the Spanish coast southwards and should reach Gibraltar in the middle of June 🙂

As usual, we’ve updated our planning map if you want to take a look at the cartography

Good evening dear all 🙂

Currently is a time of more intense sailing! Indeed, in our previous update one week ago, we were in Sicily, and in 4 days, we should be in Menorca… But I’m getting ahead of myself!

We posted our last update with the last bits (pun intended) of internet we had while crossing the Tyrrhenian Sea. After we went off the grid, the sailing trip went as close to perfect as one could hope: thanks to 20h of side winds ranging from 14 to 20 knots and fairly small waves, we could do the biggest chunk of the trip at an average speed of 6 knots. In less technical terms, we cruised comfortably through the 180 miles of our route. We also had the best encounter with dolphins so far, a small group of 5 have decided to play around the boat for a good 10 minutes.

We then spent 4 days anchored near Cagliari, a nice but not very characterial city and the (unfortunate) highlight of the stay was perhaps our anchor losing its grip and us racing from a climbing spot back to the boat, to stop it before it drifts on some rocks We also mentioned a while ago how the coast guards asked for our documents by using a big landing net in which we had to throw all of our IDs… it turns out that it is standard practice across Italy and we could finally catch it on camera 😀

To prepare for the next big trip, we then sailed 60 miles to the west-most side of Sardinia during a short but very intense trip where we got caught in winds stronger than forecasted. This time we reached a wind gust of 37 knots! (Still doesn’t beat the 40 knots we had in Croatia 2 years ago though :p )

We are now waiting in Calasetta for some storm to pass before leaving for our last and biggest crossing yet, to the Baleares. We are looking at an OK weather window starting Saturday afternoon, which ensures us to not meet any dangerous conditions, but whether we are going to have enough wind in the right direction… that we’ll have to see once we’re in it! Depending on our landing spot, we will be sailing between 200 and 230 Miles, which should take us at least 2 full days.

Once there, we plan on staying a bit in the archipelago (10-15 days) where we should meet a few people and take the time to explore the islands. As always, if you feel like spontaneously coming over, don’t hesitate to contact us 🙂

Welcome to a new update on our sailing trip! To start with a slight format update, we’ll add a map section to the blog that we’ll update once a week in which we’ll show where we are and some short/middle term estimates of where we’ll be next. That should make it easier for people who want to join us 🙂

Back to the trip! In the last update, we had just arrived in San Vito Lo Capo after a slow but pretty relaxing 48h of sailing. Some local Sicilian we had met in Taormina had recommended this place to us and… boy was he right. Although this place is less culturally rich than some of the others we’ve seen, it is a marvel of landscapes, hikes, and especially climbing. We spent 4 splendid days there and, although we would recommend Syracuse or Malta for cultural vacations, definitely check out San Vito if you want to organize a week of climbing!!!

You’ve heard the song before but we’re now taking up on the next weather window: according to the (moderately reliable) forecasts, we should have from Thursday to Saturday morning perfect side winds to sail to Cagliari (Sardinia). As we are writing this article, we have actually just started the crossing of the Thyreanean sea and we shouldn’t arrive before Saturday morning. Let’s see what happens: if the forecasts are off too much or if we are too slow, we will be caught in an annoying windless weather system which is always frustrating to handle. In the end, this should be one of our big sea crossings.

Anyway… after that, we will probably be staying in Cagliari or South Sardinia for at least a few days (a week or more). Indeed, the next step will be the trip to Mallorca, the biggest crossing of the whole trip. That means we will wait for the perfect winds before leaving Sardinia. If you fancy a few days there, don’t hesitate to send us a message! See you soon 🙂

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!

Happy Easter everyone!

We wrote our last blog post when we arrived in Sicily and we’re absolutely loving it, which is why we’re still here 🙂

So, what’s up since last time?

We spent 4 days in/around Taormina, a really nice town with a plentiful ancient Greek and Roman history.

It is also a great place for hiking with beautiful views of the sea and Mount Etna, and for climbing right by the sea. A highlight was definitely deep water soloing in the Grotta Azzura!

We then sailed to Siracusa, an iconic city that has been the main metropolis of Sicily for almost a thousand years. The sailing trip to Siracusa was rather short (around 9 hours) thanks to perfect winds and upon arrival, we could moor onto the main docks of the old town’s center (for free which is hardly believable).

We’ve now been in Siracusa for the last 4 days. Here, we explored the city, which is a cultural treasure of multiple ancient civilizations. We also took this time to hike on mount Etna and go climbing in the neighborhood. Of course, we also had to take a day for boat maintenance 🙂

And from there… what’s the plan?

As usual, winds are the true puppet masters telling us where and when we move! Our next stop is Malta and we couldn’t really get there until now as a powerful storm was raging there. On Monday, we should have an OK weather window to do the 150 km long trip to Malta but it still has a lot of uncertainty: different sources still strongly disagree on what kind of winds we will have, so we’ll probably leave at 5:30 am to keep all chances on our side.

Once in Malta, it looks so far like we will stay at least until Friday, maybe longer. Our target will then be to go westward until we reach Gibraltar. From Wednesday, a low-pressure system from Tunisia moving up north will first generate strong storms and then milder winds but will blow eastward. Let’s see if it allows us a good enough window to go to Marsala !

Hi everyone! In our last post, we wrote about our plans to sail to Sicily…and we now made it! We have arrived in Sicily last night after a slightly longer and more adventurous trip than expected…

Indeed, during our crossing of the Ionian sea, we had a very rough sea with 4m waves coming from everywhere that our autopilot could not handle. We had to steer most of the time, got very shaken by the conditions, and barely slept. The navigation being very tiring, we decided to stop in Calabria to rest and to continue to Sicily only after a good rest. On a positive note, we averaged a speed of 6.5 knots on our crossing from Greece to Calabria, making the 410km in only 35h!

We ended up spending 2 days in Calabria, doing boat work and exploring the region on our foldable bikes (until Louis’ bike had a puncture and we had to walk back to the harbor!).

The sail from Calabria to Sicily was a very pleasant, 18h long trip with a beautiful sunset above the Etna (here’s a photo of it) 🙂

We landed in Taormina and discovered a heaven of culture, landscapes, and outdoor sports! We might stay here a few days, also going to Syracusa and hiking on Mount Etna. Our next bigger stop would be Malta, probably in more than a week but the sailing trip to there should not be very long: at most a day of sailing 🙂