Hope's and Howard's Sailing Adventures

Finally, we arrived in Greece at the island of Chios in the eastern Sporades. We had intended entering Greece further north at Lesvos, to explore the eastern Sporades islands further north and the northern Sporades islands close to mainland Greece, but the approximate five weeks delay due to boat issues severely impacted our timeline. As previously mentioned we needed to be near Athens by July 20 in order to meet.. Read More

Although frustrated by the week-long Bayram holiday when we had to wait for Osman the mechanic to return to work, we were quite content at anchor in Haceteppe Bay. It was a popular spot, especially during the day as the swimming was excellent and it was close to several marinas in the Çesme region. The village of Dalyan at the head of a lovely long, boat-lined inlet and with a.. Read More

As we said in our last post, we hung around Bodrum a while awaiting word from a couple of enquiries about installing the new Vesper AIS that Ian had kindly brought with him from the UK. We ended up using a technician in Bodrum but in the meantime enjoyed exploring another anchorage or two in the vicinity. We first explored Aquarium Bay, but were not happy that the holding was.. Read More

Tarkan, our rigger, returned to Lady Mayfair the day before our new mainsail was due to arrive. He swapped out our mainsail furling line (which involved re-splicing the continuous line) as the thicker line was jamming in the furling drum and he re-tuned the rigging after the mast had settled back into position. So, just 5 days after ordering our sail and 4 days after measuring, our new sail was.. Read More

Our Easter Sunday was spent on passage, a pretty good way of enjoying it in our opinion. The passage from Karacoren to Marmaris we estimated would take us about 7 hours, assuming we maintained an average speed of about 6 knots so we didn’t have the luxury of hanging around. While we had the engine on all the way, we did unfurl the genoa a couple of times, which helped.. Read More

It’s hard to believe we have been in Finike since October; the time has passed quickly. We did, however, have a couple of trips to catch up with family. The first one was to Glasgow for about a week for a gathering of Hope’s McAusland cousins, which hasn’t happened for too many years. The second was to Wales for Christmas with the Newth family, where Sonia joined us, then to.. Read More

Our sojourn in Crete turned out to be rather short and sadly didn’t allow for much time to explore. It took us several hours to check in, first with the port authority soon after we arrived on Wednesday and then the next day with customs who prepared our transit log, a paper-driven system. Fortunately we had cleared into Schengen in Malta so didn’t need to add a stop at immigration.. Read More

We had a great first impression of the Maltese islands when we passed the sheer cliffs of Gozo on our way to Valetta. They made us think of the white cliffs of Dover! Being back in Schengen and the EU we had to check in with Customs and Immigration. This was accomplished in Grand Harbour. We docked alongside an old high dock wall and had to use a large tire.. Read More

Monastir has turned out to be a good stop. It is an interesting, fairly small marina that was not easy to spot on arrival because it seems to have been constructed in between what used to be an island and is now connected to the mainland. The masts of yachts in the marina only became visible when we were fairly close in. The marina offers good protection and is quite.. Read More

We departed Mahon, Menorca at 09:40 on Saturday September 3rd, in anticipation of good sailing in southwesterly winds that we knew would pick up overnight to gusts of around 23 knots, not bad for our easterly passage towards Carloforte, a smallish island with a large marina off the SW corner of Sardinia. We would then reevaluate to see if we wanted to continue on towards Tunisia or stop and rest.. Read More