Skipper and First mate had been having a heated debate the previous night about something called the ‘Passage di Fornelli’. I don’t know...

When Richard first said “let’s buy a boat and go sailing”, I immediately thought of sunbathing on deck, meeting other like-minded people...

Alghero is a coastal town of north-western Sardinia. Part of its population descends from Catalan conquerors from the end of the Middle...

Our original dinghy is still, we believe, somewhere in a Charles de Gaulles bonded warehouse. Sniffer dogs are trying to decide if it...

Well, it was just the two of us. Covid-19 has prevented friends getting to us in France to crew, and Italian 5-day quarantine has also...

We motor-sailed passed Barcelona in the small hours of Saturday night and Sunday morning; a shimmering band of light between the rolling...

Although the Phoenicians probably traded in the area, Barcelona was a Roman town. It was sacked – as usual – by the Visigoths, and became...

Life isn’t always rosy in the Missy Bear household. [Ever?, Ed] As you know, we celebrated our check out of France at Port-Vendres, and...

You may remember M. Albrich? He was the charming man at the border police in Port-Vendres, who said they would check us out of France and...

PORT-VENDRE Port-Vendres is an ancient deep-water port of the Mediterranean Sea, close to the border between modern France and Spain at...

NAMING CEREMONY 22.07.2021 Sari and Thorne arrived at the quay at about 10:30. (We had driven the yacht back from the marina to try and...

I have been thinking about fish a lot. Alix and I do like to eat fish, and not just on Fridays. I suppose that when you are about to...

“Today was gonna be the day, we were gonna throw the ropes to you.” OK, poetic licence, it was supposed to be Yesterday. Yesterday was...

Thorne has just noted that Missy Bear is now transmitting her position! So SAS must have set up the VHF/AIS transceiver and switched it...

Apart from the recent fad of naming Atlantic storms, I’m unaware that we Brits name specific winds that blow across our islands. In the...

Well, you let Alix write her first blog post about our plans, and the plans immediately get ripped up: “Oh my goodness, it’s this week”,...

[Alix here] I had a disturbed night. We are in a quiet lane at the top of the village, but the house next door was converted to a gite a...

We are very pleased to report today that, after half a day of chasing our tails and conversing in 'Franglais' with various people and...

France is a huge and varied country; well over twice the size of the UK, and four times the size of England, with only 1.2 times the...

At management school, they used to use the phrase ‘eating an elephant’ as a metaphor for tackling large tasks, i.e., one cannot eat an...