The start of our 2019 sailing season

For those of you who have been wondering about what’s going on with us, here is a quick recap of our story over the last few months.

Originally, our plan was to take a year or two off and go sailing, get this whole sailing thing “out of our system”, and then go back to our desks. However things changed a bit towards the end of our sailing season last year. We really fell in love with the sailing/cruising life style, so much so that we thought we are going to have to find a way to make this whole sailing thing a more permanent feature in our life style.

This is how the idea of “6 months on, 6 months off” was born. Since you can’t really sail in the Med during the winter months anyway, why not go and try to make some money over the winter? That way we can enjoy the cruising over the summer, and fill up the cruising kitty over the winter. This also allows us to stay somewhat productive members of society, which is always a plus 😀

So in October, we mored Bini up in Ragusa, Sicily. There is a community of cruisers there who spend the winter on their boats there. Having those people around makes it easier to leave our floating home for 6 months. 

Camilla took on a gig in London, and I took on a 6 months contract in Warrington, UK. That meant that after 6 months living in the tiny space of our boat, always together, we were now living a weekend relationship, with either one of us travelling over the weekend to see the other. It was quite the adjustment as you might imagine!

Talking about adjustments, going from the carefree, minimalist and quiet sailing life into a city and a job was quite a shock to the system in itself. Jimmy Buffet describes it quite well: “The days drift by that don’t have names”, and that’s exactly how we felt. I remember a situation where we were somewhere on a remote Italian island, and we realised that it must be Sunday because all the shops were closed. Transitioning from this into a world that is full of meetings and deliverables, always caught between your email and your calendar, was somewhat traumatic at first. But as always, after a few days you get back into the swing of things.

Fast forward 6 months, and it’s the middle of April. Time for Camilla and myself to get ourselves ready for another season on the boat! After much deliberation we’ve decided to spend this season in Greece. One of the things that we both found we did wrong last season was trying to cram too much stuff in. This year we want to take it slow, go with the flow, go where the wind takes us kind-of-thing.

So once again, we packed our lives into a few bags and set off towards Sicily, where Bini had spent the winter waiting for us. But wait, before heading down to Bini we stopped by in Barcelona for a few days, as it is along the way anyway. It was fun to spend a few days there, catching up with friends and getting lost wandering through the city. It is such a fantastic city! If I had to live in a city again, Barcelona would definitely be on the top of that list. 

After a few days filled with nice food, drinks and good company we headed once more to the airport to make our way to Sicily. The trip there was somewhat uneventful, and mostly spend with Camilla and myself wondering what shape Bini is going to be in after spending a whole winter by herself. We both had nightmare visions of the floor boards drifting at knee height as we decent into a moldy and smelly hole that used to be our home on the water. 

Fortunately for us, our nightmare fantasies turned out to be just that – fantasies. Bini was in excellent shape. All the work that we had put into getting her ready for the winter seemed to have paid off, as well as one of our friends in the marina looking after her. Thanks Simon! 

The next thing on the todo list was to create the todo list. We set ourselves the goal to get Bini ready for another season cruising within one week. This goal turned out to be quite aggressive, as the list of boat jobs grew larger and larger for the first few days. In a sense, boat projects are a lot like software projects. You never really know what you have to do until the job is done, and it all takes at least twice as long as you would think. What did not help was that we were now once again surrounded by sailors who as it turns out are quite a sociable bunch. “Really need to go to the chandler to get oil for the engine! Quick stop to have coffee and cornetties with some cruiser friends? Sure why not.” 😀

Here’s the list of jobs we needed to get through:

• Clean out the water tanks
• Clean the rig
• Get the insurance papers and DEPKA for Greek registration printed
• Get the sails back on
• Rig the 2nd reef
• Get rid of old, and buy a new outboard engine
• Re-attach all the blocks
• Buy jerry cans and fill up with diesel
• Food (and wine!!) provisioning
• Do a rig check (standing and running rigging)
• Clean windex on mast
• Wash and stow cockpit tent
• Get the bimini and solar panels back up
• Replace the furling line
• Install new VHF and AIS transponder
• Service the engine, and buy spares
• Unpack, and re-pack (seemingly a million times)
• Reinstate the galley

Another particularity about the sailing lifestyle is that instead of your calendar dictating how you spend your time, it’s the weather that decides when you can go and where. As we were coming towards the end of our todo list, a weather window opened for a hop north along the east coast of Sicily, towards the bottom of the “boot”. And with that, on Sunday the 28th of April, we said good bye to our friends in Ragusa and to our lives on land and started another 6 months adventure on the water.