Sailing Nomads

1. Migrating birds

It’s January in France and the mornings are very dark. It was only two degrees this morning, and densely foggy. The ground is saturated, and mountain biking can be slow and muddy work in the valley bottoms. Now is opportunity to light the log fire, curl up and read, and to ponder life some more.

As I write in the warmth, I am watching a feeding-frenzy as a host of great tits and blue tits rapidly empty the feeder of sunflower seeds outside on the balcony. The chaffinches and blackbirds hop around below expectantly, hoovering-up the detritus. Robins pick at old, dry cake left out on a saucer. It makes me wonder how these resident, garden-visitors keep fed, when the feeders are emptied and not re-filled. The little, shy firecrest never visits the feeders, but flutters around in the shrubs looking for insects or insect eggs. 

On my mountain bike rides, buzzards wheel overhead, and flocks of little egrets hunt in the damp earth and puddled water. Lone kestrels, and an uncommon pair of black-winged kites, hover on the look-out for small, live, tasty morsels scurrying below in the vegetation. Unlike the smaller residents, these larger birds will migrate some distance locally, to avoid bad weather and to search for live food.

On one recent ride, I even heard the characteristic calls of a few, very-early-leaving, common cranes as they headed north-eastwards on their long migration to Scandinavia or the Baltic from their overwintering grounds in the Iberian Peninsula or North Africa.

Each one of these species is perfectly adapted to its natural niche, whether that be a limited, small area of woodland (or individual tree), or a vast, relatively unlimited area spanning an entire continent. Each species is able, in its niche, to seek and find shelter, warmth, sources of food, and a mate. Most will survive the winter, and then return to their breeding site to raise a brood, just in time for the emergence of the food they feed to their offspring.

At the edges of these geographical niches, natural factors will limit the birds’ survival. The environment will make it more difficult, or impossible, to sustain a population there. Only gradual changes to the environment, or the species’ own evolutionary adaptation over very-many generations, will enable it to populate that moving edge. Little egrets would seldom overwinter in England, but they now do so, with no need to return to southern Europe. And the tiny firecrest, although long resident here on the continent, was only first recorded breeding in England as recently as 1962.

Missy Bear’s crew has visited several sites over the past five seasons that are important for bird migration between Africa and Europe: The Giolova Lagoon in the south-western Peloponnese; the Kalloni Salt Pans on Lesvos; Aliki Lake on Limnos; the river Axios Delta near Thessaloniki; and the Alyki wetlands on Samos. Each of these is a Natura 2000 site, which are defined as important stop-over site for birds migrating between those two continents. In addition to the flamingos, the highlight was spotting the Dalmatian pelicans – the Jumbo jet of the bird world – at Kalloni.

And we have also stumbled across the epic migration stories of a range of other animals, such as tuna (at Milazzo, Sicily), and Loggerhead turtles (at the Dalyan River, Turkey). Annual migration for all these animals is an essential part of their lifecycle and ongoing survival as a species. 

2. Migrating sailors

I suppose one might playfully suggest that we sailors are also animals interacting with, and adapting to, our watery environment. And we adopt different ‘survival’ strategies. Although successful animals do not really have much choice of where they inhabit, I do accept that most sailors choose their niche mostly on hedonistic principles:

• Some of us are relatively sedentary, content to sail on nothing other than our local freshwater lake or reservoir;

• Others move annually each summer to saline, coastal waters, and seek warmth and new foods by port-hopping. A subset is even more adventurous, and may venture offshore and cross a strait to enter the niche of another race, with their different language, food, and sailing lore. But they will usually return home to over-winter;

• Some sailors discover that the niche they have visited is so amenable for habitation, that they ‘settle’ there. It may be the weather, the security, the food, the hospitality of the locals, or the helpful diaspora of other sailors, that influences their decision to stay. Missy Bear, for example, has settled in the Dodecanese. Although she may roam annually for six months from spring to autumn, she now resides and hibernates in Leros;

• But for a small, sub-species of sailors, beneath that rather shallow, happiness-seeking objective, lurks a deeper, genetic urge to keep moving on and to explore. To sail to their next new destination is an itch that they can never fully scratch. It is a greater wanderlust, that they cannot explain. Some just keep heading east on their floating caravan, whilst some others keep heading west. It’s like a primeval pull: turning around on a reciprocal heading and sailing back just seems frustrating. It’s the ‘wrong’ thing to do. Continual migration for these footloose sailors is as natural to them as it is for landlubbers to stay firmly rooted to home soil.

3. Historic Human Migration in the Mediterranean

Some wintertime reading

Ian Goldin (‘The Shortest History of Migration’, 2025) and Sam Miller (‘Migrants, The Story of Us All’, 2023), both demonstrate eloquently, that human movement has been a constant and common feature of human evolution and life. To move has been a natural urge, or necessity, for many humans (including itchy sailors).

Migration, in its many guises, is still a very significant feature of modern life. Goldin suggests that it is usual for about 3% of the global population to be migrants, i.e. not living in the country where they were born. Although numbers are hard to measure, this percentage does not seem to fluctuate greatly. Absolute numbers of migrants are much higher today than 100 years ago, simply because the global population has exploded (3% of 9 billion people is a lot of migrants.)

These human migrations might be annual or seasonal. They may be temporary relocations, e.g., for work, or as a result of a shock. Sometimes a number of years elapse before migrants return home. Other migrations will be permanent or ongoing. And the reasons for migrating from home are very varied:

• People may be forced to move: through expulsion for misdemeanours; loss of a battle or war; or capture as slaves;

• Some may be forced to move to avoid natural or man-made famine, or drought;

• Others may move because they fear persecution;

• Some choose to move to seek new opportunities, e.g., to trade their wares; and

• Yet others feel a need to move through frustration; there is neither the land nor opportunity to fully prosper if they stay at home. A sub-set of these migrants may then prosper through conquest or plunder.

  
  

Over the past five seasons in the Mediterranean, Missy Bear has stumbled across evidence of many such examples of human migration, from ancient to modern times:

1. Migration to establish new cities: The migration of ancient Greeks from their home cities to colonise Asia Minor, southern Italy and Sicily is an example we find regularly. For example, the Dorians from the Peloponnese colonised the south-west corner Asia Minor, and founded new cities such as Knidos. Some Knidians, in turn, were expelled and headed west to found Lipari, in the Aeolian Islands off Sicily;

   
   

2. Migration through gradual displacement: We have come across the post-Roman migrations – westward and southward – of Germanic peoples, including Franks, Lombards and Goths. The latter moved partly in response to inward migration of central Asian peoples, such as the Hun. We noticed how many of the place names in the Peloponnese are not Greek, but of Avar origin, as this central Asian race (the Avars) migrated through the Balkans and settled.

   
   

3. Migration through conquest by a powerful, armed minority: We encountered the Vikings, and their Norman cousins, on several occasions. As well as terrorising the northern-eastern Atlantic, and settling briefly in North America, the Vikings swept through most of Europe via the river system. They established Kievan-Rus, and then forming the Varangian Guard of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Emperor in Constantinople. Their relatives from Normandy also became mercenaries, but in southern Italy hired first by the Lombards. The Normans eventually won favour, titles and a Kingdom, as they displaced the Byzantine Greeks from Italy, and the Arab and Berber Muslims from Sicily. They later played significant roles in the first Crusade. Rather than the more gradual migration and settlement by travelling communities, the Norman migration was a conquest by a relatively small number of males, both politically astute and of fighting age. Their rationale to leave Normandy was that they were the younger male siblings of the dynastic heir, who would inherit all. The younger brothers had to fledge, and make their own destiny, even if that was by use of force;

   
   

4. Migration to establish and maintain new trade routes: We became very familiar with the Venetians. Most of these maritime entrepreneurs (like the contemporary Genoese, and the later English East India Company) moved in search of trading opportunities. Most Venetian traders returned to Venice at the end of the season, but they also established a string of colonies from the Adriatic to the Black Sea and the Levant. These relatively small logistics settlements were necessary to service and protect their maritime trade routes, although Crete did become a full-blown colony;   

   
   

5. Migration through conquest by a land-based empire: One of the Venetians’ perennial nemeses, the Ottomans, formed an empire through migration outwards from Asia Minor. Theirs was for altogether different objectives; they wanted to spread their land-based Muslim empire in order to subjugate more people, collect more tax (both in money and human form), and so maintain an impressive central bureaucracy and a large, standing army. Their migration was won on the battlefield, and founded on military supremacy;

   
   

6. Migration through slavery: The Ottoman thirst for cheap labour created other migration, this time by force. Slavic peoples, from north and east of the Black Sea, were taken as slaves (often firstly by Mongols) and then traded to work as domestic servants, soldiers, and industrial workers on the sugar cane plantations and refineries. Although the Papacy eventually banned selling Christians into Muslim slavery, slave taking by Muslim forces, including Barbary pirates, was a major element of forced migration, including of black Africans from south of the Sahara. As we discovered, the need for non-Christian slaves to work in sugar manufacture, was the catalyst for the Portuguese and Spanish to start transporting west-African slaves across the Atlantic to Brazil and the Caribbean;

   
   

7. Migration from persecution or fear: When we visited the Ionian and Ioannina, we learned how Ali Pashi (the local Albanian Muslim ruler, loosely under Ottoman control) had mercilessly persecuted the local Orthodox Christian Souliotes. Instead of certain martyrdom, the few survivors of that race left the mainland, and sought refuge on the nearby Ionian Islands, such as Kefalonia.  Conversely, in northern Greece, we remembered how a Muslim pirate-cum Ottoman admiral, Barbarossa, had helped the Jewish community flee the terror of Catholic Spain, to establish their Sephardic community in Thessaloniki. (Unfortunately, 450 years later, after prospering in this part of the relatively benign Ottoman empire, their descendants faced an altogether more horrific migration: to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, where the majority of this 72,000-population was exterminated. Of the survivors, some tried to return to Greece to find their homes had been sold by the Germans to Greek Christians. Others migrated to western Europe, or the USA or to the British Mandate of Palestine). On a smaller scale, fear of Barbary piracy forced many Greek island inhabitants to leave their coastal dwellings, and to build villages high-up on rocky precipices away from these marauding Muslims. Since piracy was eradicated (largely thanks to the Royal Navy), the descendants of those villagers abandoned their hill-top villages, to reinhabit the shore-line; a multi-generational round-trip of hundreds of years. In modern times, one could argue that many of the immigrants currently housed in the fenced-camp on Leros, may simply be fleeing potential harm in Afghanistan, Syria, Palestine, Egypt or Somalia.     

   
   

8. Migration resulting from nationalism: The disaster of the Greco-Turkish war, following on from WWI and the collapse of the Ottoman empire, is a theme we have returned to again and again. The religious nationalism arising from the expanded nation of Greece, and the creation of the fledgling Republic of Turkey led to racist atrocities. A mass population exchange was agreed, to help avoid more bloodshed. 1.2 million Orthodox Christian ‘Greeks’ were forced to leave their homes in Asia Minor. In return, 400,000 Muslim ‘Turks’ were evicted from Greece. (It seems these lessons were not fully learned during the later partition of India from East and West Pakistan).

   
   

9. Migration from an existential crisis: We visited the sponge-fishing museum on Kalymnos, and learned how over-exploitation of a natural resource by Greek divers led to smaller, and then greater migrations. Once the local sponges had been eradicated, the Greeks sailed further away each season, even as far as Africa, leaving their families at home. Once this seasonal industry became unsustainable, whole communities simply packed up and left, many headed for the USA (Florida) to establish new sponge-diving communities. Recently, we have met many Greeks families who have returned to the islands following the financial crisis of 2008. Some now speak English with an ‘Aussie’ accent. Many felt forced to leave their homeland due to unemployment and austerity, and to make a livelihood elsewhere. Many are now returning, several years later as bar-staff, butchers, electrical shop owners, and managers of car-rentals, some with a strange, new love of Aussie-Rules football. (And we should remember that the Australia population resulted largely from the mass, often forced, migration of many British citizens.)

   
   

Migration in the Mediterranean today

Humans, over many thousands of years, have gradually lost their nomadic lifestyles. We have become domesticated and sedentary urban dwellers. But, once you start listing all these events from our blogs, a realisation dawns that migration in the Mediterranean is still not that unusual or abnormal.

The Mediterranean continues to be a significant migratory crossroads. The pull factor of a relatively prosperous, modern Europe is irresistible for ambitious, or frightened, people seeking to leave behind poor, turbulent or even dangerous homelands. Of course, most of the migrants entering Europe via Greece, Italy and Spain, are doing so ‘illegally’. They are not simply coming for a holiday. They wish to work, and maybe settle temporarily, and many will aim to stay permanently. But they neither have the proper documentation nor permission.

Yet, Goldin reminds us of another interesting point; that passport-free travel was the norm before 1914. It was only the need to try and identify people - potential enemies - in a time of global conflict, that passports with photo ID were introduced. And the policing of this could only be possible with relatively sophisticated and extensive national borders. In the 19^th century, it’s probably that these migrants would not have been travelling ‘illegally’. Whether they would have had the need, or desire, or the means to leave home back then, is another question.

So, although we all now accept the idea of nation states, national borders and identity documents, this has really only been the norm for a century. To counter this, since 1995, most European Union (EU) member states become part of the Schengen Area. The UK, Ireland and Cyprus did not join, so we still had to show our passports at EU immigration control. All EFTA members, namely Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland, are all signed-up members of the Schengen Area. Within this area, there is free movement of citizens and goods, with no internal border checks nor passport controls. Schengen effectively un-wound the migration restrictions introduced since WWI.

But, after ‘Brexit’ day, the UK became a ‘third country’. We British Citizens continued to have to show passports at external EU immigration controls, but now we must have them stamped. And that is when the Schengen clock starts ticking; a ‘third-country’ national can only spend 90 days in the EU within any 180-day rolling period.

If you leave the EU and the immigration officer discovers you have remained in the EU for 91 days, you are in trouble – probably a large fine, and potential banishment for a few years. As you may recall, this caused the crew of Missy Bear a few logistical headaches in 2021, when we collected and commissioned Missy Bear in southern France, before heading east to Türkiye.

If we had been allowed to stay for up to 90 days each in a different Schengen country consecutively (France, then Spain, then Italy, then Greece, for example), that would have been lovely. But the 90-day rule applies to the entire twenty-nine countries as a block. And that is a huge area – an entire continent in fact – in which to have no country to find legal refuge on day 91.

We crew now have fewer and fewer options to travel easily within Europe, as more counties, such as Croatia, join Schengen; Cyprus has also applied. The options for the crew to remain afloat in Europe, but outside Schengen, are now limited to Montenegro and Albania. Other than that, we must sail to Africa, or Türkiye, or the Levant (too dangerous for insurance cover), else all the way back to the UK/Ireland. We choose Türkiye.  

For working age, ‘live-aboard’ yachties in the Med and elsewhere though, there is a solution to remain a migrant, or to be truly nomadic. With modern communications technology, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink, many sailors are officially ‘Digital Nomads’. Their only home is their boat, and they reside wherever the boat is located. But if they possess a Digital Nomad Visa (applied for and issued by an individual country, such as Greece), they are permitted to live and work in that country (ranging from 6 months up to 5 years), whilst being employed by a foreign company.

A quick Google search finds that there may now be 40-50 million digital nomads worldwide, but it could be as high as 80 million. For example, when moored in Preveza, we made friends with a liveaboard couple and their cat (‘Tiny cat’). She was a professional travel blogger, and sold advertising off the back of it. We also know a woman on a liveaboard in Greece, who spends each morning doing telesales for a UK company.

The crew of Missy Bear are not migrants. I suppose we might be deemed seasonal migrants, still resident in the Cotswolds? I could also argue that we are nomadic, as we flit between Cirencester, Aubeterre-Sur-Dronne and the Med (periodically applying for short-term tourist visas). But that would be romanticising the simple, fortunate lifestyle of a couple of retirees, whilst trivialising the lives of the few true nomads who still exist!

So, no, we are neither true migrants nor truly nomadic.  But I do respect all the nomads and migrants out there. Each individual will have their own back-story, and valid reasons for leaving home. Leaving is not always the easy option. And those reasons will normally be innocent. The more one reads and understands, the easier it is to be sympathetic…