Hi everyone! In our latest post, we had just arrived to Corfu (Greece) from Dubrovnik. Since then we’ve had an awesome time exploring the Greek coast 🙂

We stayed in Corfu for five days, where we did some nice hiking, explored the city of Corfu and fixed a few things on the boat including our engine. We sheltered from strong winds for 2 days in a beautiful harbor located right behind an ancient fortress in Corfu-city.

We then sailed further south towards Mytikas. The sail was meant to take us 24 hours but the direction of the wind was not as announced in the weather forecast and after 12 hours, we decided to anchor on the island of Paxos and await better winds. Those came the next day and we could continue our trip to Mytikas through rather strong winds. We arrived in Mytikas yesterday evening.

Today, we visited Mytikas, which is a very typical Greek costal town. We also went climbing in a beautiful sector right by the sea 🙂

Our next stop should now be in Sicily! We are catching a favorable wind window which should bring us east and north winds over the next 3 days, perfect for the crossing of the Ionian sea. We will departure on Monday morning for a crossing which will be up to 280 nm long and will take up to 3 days. As for our last crossing, we will first aim at a closer harbour, Roccella Ionica, which we will reach in 2 days and from there we’ll check if the weather allows us to continue safely to Sicily.

Hello everyone!

We’ve had a very nice couple of days in Dubrovnik! On Tuesday, we visited the old town, ‘hiked’ up a hill with a nice view on the city, and got lost on a pathless mountain on our way back to the boat (but we made it, as you might have guessed). On Wednesday, we tried out our folding bikes and went climbing at a crag near Dubrovnik 🙂 Here’s a video of Louis cycling with style:

Thursday and Friday were sailing days, on which we sailed from Dubrovnik to Korfu (Greece). For both of us, this was our longest sail up to now. We first sailed towards Lecce (Italy) with good winds from the North-West, allowing us to travel at an average speed of 6 knots. Shortly before Italy, we changed heading and continued towards Korfu in a more or less straight line, but slightly slower. We arrived in a bay in the north of Korfu this morning at 4:30am.

We’re planning to spend the next few days here or in a nearby anchorage in Korfu and explore the island. Sometime next week we’ll sail a bit further south to explore more Greek islands, potentially Lefkada or Kefalonia – if anyone has any recommendations, please let us know :). Then, around 10 days from now, we will start looking for good weather opportunities for a longer crossing which should bring us to Sicily. We’ll provide some updates when we have clearer plans!

Some Infos on joining on board

These last couple of days gave us much better insight into how we can host guests onboard.

For day sailing we can have up to 4-5 guests at a time (it’s a boat for 6) but if you’re to come for several nights then we should limit it to 3 guests max. Otherwise it might get a little crowded.

We will also have 3 longer sea crossings: Greece to Sicily, Sicily to Sardinia and Sardinia to the Ballears. Each should take us 2 to 3 days of sailing. If you’re interested in taking part, we’d be very happy to have you on board 😀 See you soon on Misty-sea !

Good morning everyone! Good news: we’ve now properly started our trip and have arrived in Dubrovnik 🙂

On Sunday morning, we received some help to unblock our steering wheel and left the harbour in the afternoon. Sailing to Dubrovnik took us around 24 hours and everything went pretty smoothly. The winds were very Croatian, unpredictability changing direction and switching from no wind at all to rather strong winds. This, the proximity to the coast and sailing at night time rendered the whole sail quite interesting and fun!

And now ?

We’re now at an anchorage near Dubrovnik and will spend a few days here to discover the city and surroundings. Our next plans would be to go further south in the Adriatic, ideally towards Corfu. The current wind forecasts show winds going south until Friday night, which is ideal for us. After that, the winds shift and go North which would make the journey considerably more difficult. That’s why our idea would be to leave on Thursday, plain south, in direction Brindisi in Italy. After that, if the winds are still favorable, we could continue westwards and reach Corfu. Of course, depending on how the weather evolves, we might adapt our plans again 🙂

Good evening dear reader, today is a big day: we make our first update from Misty Sea ! We landed in Split on Monday where we took our rental car and drove to Marina Ramova: an awesome road along the coast with one problem, you drive 60 km in 1h30… when we arrived, we found Misty Sea who had just been put down in the water. We were super excited to see her again and apparently all well until we inspected how the boat was really doing. We quickly found 3 major problems: One battery had exploded, the ship’s steering wheel was almost impossible to move and the engine wouldn’t start. We got suddenly really anxious about things to come! It turned out that the engine and battery problems were only a single one: the whole battery setup died during the 2 years on land and thus we had almost no power to start the engine. Over the last 4 days, we’ve spent our whole time making repairs and preparing the boat for the trip, and we’re finally starting to see the end of our troubles (hopefully 😉 ). The only important remaining issue is the steering wheel which is still too stiff, but we’re making good progress 🙂

What’s next?

Although we still have a few things to fix, it looks like we’ll be leaving for Dubrovnik on Saturday or Sunday depending on the winds and if everything else goes according to plan… There we’ll probably stay for a few days before deciding on our next stop 🙂

Post Scriptum

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Hello Everyone! Two years after our last post, we are back! You might have guessed but our first attempt in march 2020 didn’t go through… After 5 days of quarantine, we have been expelled and had to go back to Germany, during a journey even crazier (and scarier) than the way to Croatia. Since then, we had only one idea in mind: when can we go back ??? We first moved the boat to a land storage near Split, then skipped a year because Spring 2021 had an even tougher lockdown, and are now ready again to set sails!

What changed?

Despite the (small) delay, we didn’t change anything to our plans (we even reuse the same blog…) and the trip should be the same: to sail from Croatia to Northern Europe in around 6 months… OK we might have added 2-3 weeks to our initial dates ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . We also kept the idea to communicate to everyone through this blog where we are and where we go next. That way we can meet friends and family along the way or have them join us spontaneously for a few days (if you have a few spare vacations days lying around :p)

Official departure to Croatia: 14th of March 2022

It’s in only 8 days and after 2 years of tiring suspense, it’s finally real again. We first plan on staying near Split for a short week, to get the boat back on foot and we hope to set sails around March, 20th. Let’s see when we’re ready and the winds are favorable 😉

First stop: Dubrovnic

We will start slowly with a short trip (around 24h) which will also keep us pretty close to the coast at all times. That will be perfect to get back in shape but also we really wanted to visit this awesome city. See you there!

Good-morning Croatia! We have some pretty big updates about the whole trip (as you can imagine from the situation). Given the progressive shutting of all the borders we have seen last week, and especially the sudden decision to close the German borders on Monday morning, we have left 1 week earlier (on Sunday) in a pretty crazy adventure. If you’re interested, we’ve written another blog post telling more in details how it all went.

We are now in quarantine in Croatia for 14 days, which means we have to stay on the boat but so far the conditions of the quarantine are really enjoyable. We are trying to survive the Croatian good weather as well as we can 🙂

The planning for the trip is obviously a bit modified, we were supposed to sail through a lot of countries and it is at this point a bit difficult to cross borders. This means that we will be staying in Croatia at least 4 weeks or otherwise as long as the borders are shut. Of course we will provide updates as soon as we get new infos!

Hello readers! The week leading to – and the departure of the trip was a bit of an adventure, so we’ve written a slightly lengthy article about it for whoever’s got too much time at home office and wants a good read 🙂

The initial plan was to leave from Munich to Croatia on the 22nd of March. Clearly that was ambitious! During the week between the 8th and 13th of March, we started seeing countries take more and more measures to close the borders and every new update seemed to make the journey more complicated. Austria had officially restricted the entries for Germans, and allowed them in only to cross the country. Slovenia was already tougher and required a negative test for Coronavirus at most 3-days old, and this only for crossing the country. We organized with a Doctor to take the test on the next Wednesday, hopping to receive the results for Saturday and be allowed to cross Slovenia.

On Friday 13th, the situation took a turn for the worse. All the countries were tightening their border controls and Croatia decided to force a mandatory 14 days quarantine to any incomer coming from a ‘seriously infected’ country. It was crazy to think that only 5 days earlier, we were in Croatia, all the borders were opened and only Italy had taken serious measure. It was clear that everything would shut down very fast that in 7 days, the journey would be unthinkable. The first option to this problem was naturally to post-pone the departure, we stay in Munich as long as the war agains the virus is still going on and hopefully we can still make the trip with a one-month delay. There was however a major issue with this plan: we had signed all the contracts to leave our flat on Sunday 23rd of March and if we stayed, we would be stuck in Munich but with no place to live… so we decided to leave on the next Monday at 12:00. To be honest, it wasn’t an easy choice. First that reduced our time to prepare from 8 to 2 days. It also meant that on Monday, we had one morning to settle our things with our respective jobs, call the Croatian authorities to see what would be the conditions of the quarantine and we would try to cross the Slovenian border without the Coronavirus test. It was a definitely a pretty busy and stressful week-end. We went climbing one last time but otherwise spent our time tiding up the place and preparing for the departure.

Then on Sunday afternoon things went out of control:

at 16:30 Sara received a text from her Sister studying near Berlin: “I don’t know what to do, I plan to go back home but Germany is closing its borders tomorrow Morning”. We went straight back home to check the news and it was true: at 16:00 on Sunday, the German government had decided to close all of its southern borders on Monday at 8:00. After 5 minutes of discussions, we decided to leave now!

At 16:40 I could luckily reach my team lead (on a Sunday) asking for his permission. I would drop-off my stuff from work to a Colleague (Michi) who would take care of giving it to the office for me. During the next 45 minutes, we cleared everything from our house, put all we would need for the next 5 months in the car, gave the keys to the neighbors and finally shut the door without our keys to get back inside.

17:25: Less than an hour after we learned about the Germans closing the borders, we were off for the next 5 months, not knowing if we could cross the Austrian border, not knowing if the Slovenian border would indeed ask for the Coronavirus test and not knowing what it meant to be in quarantine in Croatia for 14 days. We were actually pretty sure to be back to Munich in a few hours after one of the borders would reject us.

17:40: First stop at Michi’s house to leave my work laptop and keys. After a quick good-bye we’re off for a 1h drive until the first border.

18:55: We cross the the Austrian border without any control, what a relief! We drive for another 2h30 until the next border. We are almost alone on the road which makes the trip a little more relaxing 🙂

21:30: We arrive at the border of the country with the toughest restrictions. We’re really anxious especially since the border control is right after a 10 km long tunnel which makes for a great cinematic. But there, big surprise: there is nothing! No control, no sign of the border and no one on the road either. During the first few minutes, we are actually not sure if we really in Slovenia or if the border control would be further down the road.

23:30: Final test the Croatian border. This one is a bit different: since Croatia is not in the Schengen zone, we know there will be physical borders. We arrive there and are stopped at the customs by two officers. They asked for all of our papers, including proof of owning the boat and proof that it has a place in the Marina. Luckily, Sara being Sara, she thought earlier that the bills from the marina could be a useful documents, which was indeed our only proof of residence at the customs. After registering our data in the system, they described the terms and conditions of the quarantine and then let us pass.

00:30: We finally arrive at the boat able to rest after a completely crazy day!

Hi everyone! Things are moving on for our sailing trip… We got a boat! And a starting date: the week-end of the 21st of March. You’ve got a map showing approximately the journey we plan to make and to give you an overview of the timeline. So if you already got an idea of where and when you’d like to join, let us know!