It’s winter now in the northern hemisphere and the weather has been hard to predict. Maybe we could have extended our season by a few more weeks and seen more of Sicily or even visited Malta. But I think for the first season we had plenty of adventure and spent many nights at anchor in some beautiful anchorages.
Now we are in our designated winter birth getting stuck into the winter projects maybe it’s time to reflect and plan the year ahead.
Our 2018 season started early in March after the Atlantic winter storms had abated and allowed us to leave the safety of the Cascais harbour that had only days and weeks prior protected us from the sometimes 6 to 8m swells.
We made our way along the Spanish Coast to Calpe where we crossed for our adventure in the Balearic islands of Spain. We then crossed to Sardinia, Italy and then up north to Corsica, France. We spent only a short time there hiding of the abnormal weather that hit the Mediterranean this year, so within a short period, we moved on to Elba further north and down the western Italian islands and coast.
We ended our Italian adventure in Palermo Italy before crossing the Sicily Strait to Tunisia in North Africa, this is where we are wintering for the rest of this year and we will depart sometime in Early 2019.
In Tunisia, we are seeing the sights and getting a number of projects completed and you can see these on our blog.
As for next year, we have two routes in mind and I guess our final decisions will be made early in the year.
Option 1 is to sail the eastern Italian coast up as far as Venice, then cross to Trieste before heading down the Adriatic Sea to Croatia visiting and spending time on the islands then onto Montenegro and Albania visiting the Ionian islands with a winter somewhere on the south or even crossing to Cyprus for the winter.
Option 2 that seems to be more appealing to us is to cross via the southern Sicilian coast to Malta and then onto the Greek islands and Turkey for six to eight months before wintering in Cyprus with a possible winter visit to Lebanon or Israel. This would leave Option 1 to be done in 2020.
The following year 2021 might be finding our way back out of the Med with a few stops in places we didn’t see or were keen to revisit. I guess our plan would be to cross the Atlantic late in 2021 with visits on the way via Madeira Archipelago and a long stop in The Canaries and Cape Verde before crossing.
I think that’s enough with the forward planning for now as times and experiences go forward I’m sure this plan will change.
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