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Those of you who follow our blog will remember that 2023 wasn’t a great sailing year for us. We didn’t make it out to Missy Bear at all in the spring, but managed six weeks bumbling around in the autumn. When I started my physio at Cirencester Hospital a year ago, the physio asked me what was my goal, in terms of what movement I was trying to recover. I know that someone with a similar injury to mine had said she wanted to be able to get her bra on by using her hands behind

We had to put the heating on last night. It was about 22:00 and we were inspecting the back of our eyelids, waiting to head to the square, outside the church, for the Easter day celebrations that would start at midnight. It had been a cloudy day, with the odd short rain shower. So maybe it was psychological, but I wanted Missy Bear to be warm and welcoming when we crawled back in later. It was hard to believe that two weeks earlier Tony and I had been swimming off the bathin

We got our first glimpse of the whiteness of the building perched impossibly, like an eerie, into the precipitous cliff face above us. Our silver Mercedes taxi wound up the snaking, mountain approach-road, and pulled up for us to get a better look. We gazed in awe at the limestone landscape that dominated this tiny monastery, yet were also in awe of the monks who had the vision and fortitude to attempt to build their home here centuries before (in about 1500). It was half a m

In the same way that seeing kite-surfers in your intended anchorage can be disconcerting, seeing a kayaking school practising through slalom poles in a channel of falling white-water that you must shortly traverse, could also be mildly alarming! Alix and I are very used to sailing on the south coast of England, where a normal spring tidal range is about 4 metres. We have chartered a yacht on Vancouver Island (Canada), where we had to deal with a similar range, but one that cr

Spring is sprung… …the grass is ris’ I wonder where de birdies is? The bird is on the wing! But how absurd, I t’ought the wing was on de bird” Tamarisk in bloom Swinging on the hook at the head of Ormos Almiropotamou, we were partly surrounded by a shrub-clad rocky headland, and well-sheltered from the expected southerly blow. From the greenery came the flitting, warbles of the many small, brown birds that were obviously excited by the prospect of another season. This verda