Visiting Europe

It has been quite a year for us, with much travelling back and forth between locations in Europe, including a wonderful trip to Sweden in the northern hemisphere mid-summer   We also managed another side trip to Sicily to meet up with Marie Louise and Richard (our son’s in-laws) for a somewhat boozy week to then rush back to Malta in time to greet Marie & Steve who came all the way from Perth and also stopped over to visit us!

It has also been great catching up with all the cruisers who have stopped over in Malta on their summer cruising this year.  We did hope that keeping busy would stop us from missing our beloved MISCHIEF too much, but in the last month or two we have been wondering not if but when and where to get our next boat again!!  - By the way, to those cruisers crossing the Atlantic this year, Mischief is also crossing, but with her new owners who are a really lovely Spanish couple.

Bjorn and I have kept busy in Malta these last three months doing some courses to keep our brains occupied.  Bjorn has done an AutoCAD course whilst I have done a TEFL (teaching English as a foreign language) refresher course and may consider some part time teaching whilst in Malta.

Meanwhile it has been great visiting with our families here in Malta and Sweden.

Landlubbers again!

Given our decision to spend another couple of years in the Med, and with all the berthing difficulties in Malta and the boat registration situation, we decided to test the market and list Mischief ….and to our greatest surprise, shock actually, which found us totally unprepared, we had a couple expressing interest in the first month of listing the boat.

Of course, we did not take this seriously, and were still wondering whether these people were for real when they decided to come and visit the boat in Ragusa in March this year.

We had just spent the coldest two months ever in what turned out to be a record cold year in the Med – and Malta winters and headed to Ragusa to prepare Mischief for her not really very welcome visitors…. I am sure they must have thought we were mad – or madly in love with the boat because Bjorn and I kept on exchanging looks and asking each other if this was really what we wanted!

To our dismay, the young Spanish couple totally fell in love with our beloved Mischief and upped their price, and we really could not say no!  And there starts our new saga.

Our Sicilian spring turned out to be quite different from usual.  Instead of joining our cruising friends all happy to leave this winter behind them and busily getting their boats ready for another summer cruising season, we started going through the boat and trying to work out what to leave and what – and how – to take the rest off!  We did manage a few forays to explore more of Sicily, which we have grown to really love, even ‘discovering’ the largest Roman villa we have seen so far with the most amazing mosaics!  To be honest though, many of the many very ‘happy’ (read ‘boozy) time with our friends felt almost like wakes, so shell shocked were we with the way things had turned out with Mischief.

Bjorn and Kerry (Geronimo) sailed Mischief back to Malta in mid April, while Helen (Geronimo) and I drove our car back via ferry and spent a wonderful week or so together in Malta.  Our transition to land was somewhat eased taking a number of yachting friends who called into Malta on their way around the island.

It was also time to take stock of what we wanted to do now that we would be land bound, and so Bjorn and I turned our attention to renting an apartment to have as a base in Malta for the next couple of years whilst we enjoyed our parents in Malta and in Sweden and concentrated on land travel for the next few years.  We were indeed fortunate to find a lovely airy apartment just on the seafront in a quiet part of St Paul’s Bay, with a grandstand view of the bay and St Paul’s Island (where the apostle Paul got shipwrecked on his way to Rome). 

To celebrate our joint birthdays in May, we travelled to Venice and had a glorious couple of days going around the city that had so eluded us on our cruising trip up to Croatia.  We then went on to our friend Mara in Ravenna and enjoyed a leisurely week exploring the magnificent Po delta and some of the surrounding towns, villages and cities including the incredible Florence.

Our summer is indeed proving to be a busy one with my nephew’s wedding in mid June, and two of my sisters visiting for a couple of weeks.  Our daughter Annika comes out for a visit in July and then we are off to Sweden for 5 weeks to visit Bjorn’s family and do more land travel, this time hopefully going to St. Petersburg and Moscow, before returning to Malta once more to more friends visiting.

That’s it for now from us…. We’re hoping that sv.mischief changes from ‘sailing vessel mischief’ to ‘salty veterans (of) mischief…’ which means that our email address stays the same… who knows we may yet be back again on the water and heading west once more!!!

Winter in Ragusa Sicily and Seachange

We sailed into Malta in early-mid September to catch up with family and suss out the marina situation there.  With the planned upgrade to Msida marina, berthing in Malta over winter was not an option, and so we left for Ragusa in early October, and headed into a marina with many previous friends - and acquaintances old and new…. It was great fun catching up with everyone.  The marina is really well planned and very safe, so we had no hesitation in leaving Mischief there over the winter months.

With Bjorn’s parents not well, and pressure building to visit as soon as possible, we reluctantly left the marina, headed to Malta and then on to Sweden.  We spent three weeks there and watched Bjorn’s dad deteriorate… within three days of our return to Malta, he passed away.

Back in Malta, and visiting my parents, it was becoming increasingly obvious that they also needed greater attention and that perhaps their days of living independently were coming to an end.   We were also in two minds about crossing the Atlantic anyway, and the need to stay put and help out was very much on our minds.

We watched as many of our friends just kept going across the Atlantic and then continued across the Pacific, making it an almost two year trek.  We always thought that if we cross the Atlantic we would like to spend a few years in the Americas.    

With the decision to stay in the Med for an additional couple of years to see what happens, we decided to make Malta our base for now and bought a small runabout (ie. car).

Things were brought to a head when my mum fell and broke her hip, but thank goodness the surgery went well and she is well on her way to recovery.

We had planned to spend a week or two in Ragusa in December to check on the boat, especially as the autumn had brought along the usual swag of storms, so as my sister headed to Malta for a week to help out with our parents, Bjorn and I took the opportunity to go and spend Christmas in Ragusa.  Having taken the car over with us via ferry, we took advantage of every fine day to go and explore some the very beautiful surrounding towns like Ragusa city, Modica and Scicli…

We had a very ‘merry’ Christmas, a wonderful break, a good opportunity to check up on the boat, and headed back to Malta to ‘dry out’!!!

And now the serious thinking starts:  on the one hand, we love our Mischief, but it is impractical to keep such a boat in a marina in a different country and not have its enjoyment.  Things are further complicated by constantly changing laws in Europe, making it difficult to cruise long term in the Med.  For example, Italy has just this month introduced a tax for boats cruising in Italian waters from May this year, which makes it even more prohibitive to keep the boat in Italian waters.  Space at Malta marinas are at a premium, Greece has its own raft of taxes which make it difficult to keep a boat there over 3 months and both the EU and non EU alternatives are fading fast.  It looks like we will have to reside in Malta for a short while, making it difficult to keep an Australian flagged ship in EU waters.

We are even looking into the possibility of shipping Mischief back to Australia or to some other part of the world such as Asia!!

Definitely a time of literal ‘seachange’, or is going to be ‘landchange’, for us at present, but the adventures will hopefully not stop, but rather change form.