It’s 4am although I don’t know it. I’m sleepily tucked up in our bunk luxuriating in being off watch. But not for long. Phil comes to tag team and I so turn the bunk over to him and I’m up. Out on deck it’s quite a contrast to when I went off watch. There’s half a moon lighting up the ocean and twinkling stars in the sky. The wind is back in a more suitable direction and we are skimming along at a comfortable 5-6 knots. Earlier that night during my watch we had a period of very light inconsistent wind and lumpy seas resulting in flapping sails and clunking deck hardware.

I sit in the cockpit and over a cup of tea, I reflect once again on how much sailing can teach us about living life. I had so much judgment going on when the conditions were not great about how unpleasant it was, how I wish it wasn’t like this, and wanting the better conditions, which were forecast for later, to hurry up and get here. At one point I realised that here was an opportunity to practice letting the judgments go and just accept things as they were and deal with them as best I could. As I practiced, I found that while the conditions didn’t change, my experience of them did and I relaxed somewhat.

It would have been beneficial if I had been able to achieve something similar during the months leading up to our return to Paseafique. It had been a very intense period from when we returned in October last year through until mid May when we left Melbourne. Sadly, Phil’s Mum died literally minutes before we arrived at her bedside the day after we landed. She had been diagnosed earlier in 2022 with inoperable bowel cancer, and stopped the chemotherapy as it was making her miserable. We had been in touch with her a lot with many text messages and calls over the months as her illness progressed. Once she started to deteriorate, she went downhill pretty quickly but held on until she knew that Phil was back in Australia and on his way to Lindenow where she lived. She was 88 years old and had been unbelievably fit and active. It was a very sad time for Phil and his brothers as their father had died a few years previously.

The build of our new house was nearing completion and the builders kept telling us what they thought we wanted to hear about the hand over date, rather than giving us a realistic time frame. In the end, we had hand over one week before we were due to board the plane for Athens. One week in which to make the house ready for renters – install window coverings, and a letter box, fix a section of the neighbour’s fence, get the fencer to finish our side fence, and organise for some landscaping as the yard was just a mess. Then half way through that week, a tree fell onto power lines in the street resulting in a high voltage power incident which “cooked” the meters and damaged appliances in about 80 houses in the area, including our new house. The power company replaced the meter pretty quickly, but the video intercom/doorbell had also been damaged as had a coffee maker that we were using there. Oh joy, now we had to also lodge a claim with the power company requiring documents we didn’t have such as proof of purchase of the doorbell. None of this would normally seem insurmountable except that Phil was in the early stages of recovering from a prostatectomy for prostate cancer (all ok there as pathology and post-op blood test showed), and was not allowed to do any heavy lifting or strenuous activity. We got it all done, thanks to our wonderful sons, Andrew and Reece, and friends Peter, Gayle, Leonie, Emma and Ayden, who helped us with the tasks and provided moral support. We are so lucky to have such supportive, kind and generous family and friends.

We flew out of Melbourne seven weeks to the day after Phil’s surgery, with some trepidation about the journey and the work which awaited us at the boat. Phil was doing well, but his bladder had not fully recovered, he was meant to be only gradually increasing the loads he was lifting, and he was not yet back to full general fitness. We were rescued by our friends Adrian and Marianna from Anthem, who had specifically come to Preveza to help us. They picked us up from the bus in Preveza and whisked us back to their boat where we slept and were cared for while we got Paseafique fit for habitation. They also helped with a few of the heavy jobs.

Once back on board in the yard, we had some significant jobs to tick off. The standing rigging (the bits of wire that hold the mast up) had been replaced while we were away, and we had to reconnect all the electrical wiring at the bottom of the mast and feed it through an impossibly small tube to the inside of the boat. Two new roller furlers (gadgets that roll up the two headsails) had also been installed. All the sails had to be put back on, and the sheets re-fitted. Not the sheets on the bed, the sheets for the sails – the ropes that pull them in and out. The anchor and anchor chain had been re-galvanised in our absence and so needed to be put back on the boat. We had some new lithium batteries delivered to the yard while we were away, and these needed to be installed, along with a new inverter. The new batteries would significantly increase our amp hours and the new inverter meant that we could now run a few small electrical appliances regularly, like a jug and toaster. In addition, we had 400 smaller jobs on the list (not really!). The boat jobs tested our endurance and patience, and although we knew we would get to the end of that job list, it seemed a long way off. We have prepared the boat to be re-launched a number of times, and yet every time we are in the thick of it, it’s hard to be comforted by the knowledge that launch day will come.

Of course launch day did eventually come, only 10 days after we arrived back in Greece. We couldn’t have done it without Adrian and Marianna’s help and support. We said farewell to them – again, and scooted off to Saranda, Albania before we used up any more Schengen time. For those who are not familiar with Schengen, it’s the name of the agreement to which most European countries are signatories, and it limits the time of non-EU citizens in the whole Schengen area to 90 days in each 180 day period. Consequently, it is going to be a challenge to manage our time accordingly until we get to the Canaries towards the end of this year.

For those who have been following our blogs, you may recall that we spent about three weeks in Albania last year, so this time around we were there mainly to rest in a non-Schengen country. We anchored in Saranda and spent a peaceful 10 days or so there. It was exactly what we both needed after such an intense period.

We did go to Tirana, the capital, on a shopping expedition for a couple of days though. With the increased availability of power on the boat, we wanted to buy a portable induction cooktop thereby decreasing the need for gas. We had thought we found one in Saranda, but it was not quite right and so we figured that there would be more choice in Tirana – wrong! In fact, there were no portable induction cooktops to be had. We did however, visit the “House of Leaves”, the Central Directorate of the Secret Service of Albania from 1944 to 1991. It is now the Museum of Secret Surveillance which gave us yet another interesting insight into the Albanian Communist era.

Feeling refreshed and ready for new horizons, we headed off to Syracuse, on the island of Sicily where we met up with another set of good cruising friends, Liz and Steve from Liberte, who we had last seen in Turkey about 12 months ago. It was fabulous to see them again, and as they had been in Syracuse for a little while, they kindly gave us the low down on all the important things. We were both planning a Schengen escape to Malta (it’s actually in the Schengen area, but the officials usually only stamp yachties in on a crew list rather than the passports – complicated eh?), so we decided to cruise in company. After only a few days in Syracuse, the weather was right so we sailed together to a bay on the south of Sicily for a couple of days while we waited for a weather window for Malta.