We sail to Malta.

July 11^th, 2013

We were excited to be finally heading out of the Aegean Sea and back into the Central Mediterranean. It was if an exciting chapter was closing whilst another new exciting adventure was about to begin!

Malta was 430 miles to the west – if we are able to sail direct. There would be no stopping points and it would be the longest sail that Les and I ever taken on our own in ‘Timeless’. We do like trying new things all the time.

The only potential concern (that we couldn’t do anything about anyway) would be the wind direction. It was forecasted to be coming from the west for a few hours and then to veer to the north ‘ish. This suited us fine because we would start our journey on a beam reach and then turn towards west whilst the wind began to turn NW.
But, if the wind didn’t move at least to the NW then we would be close-haul sailing which is always a pain. The Forecast was calling for the same wind direction for another week or more yet.

We lifted our anchor mid-afternoon and headed to Malta.

As it happens the wind didn’t quite move as far North as we might have wished and so we were continually sailing close to the wind.
We even had to tack for a while. But in the main we could sail close enough to our destination to ensure a reasonable speed but not spectacular our log shows our SOG at between 4 and 6 knots most of the way – not too bad.

When we are sailing as a couple Les and tend not to have a rigid night watch system. We have tried several formal systems but we have found that sleeping as the body requires whilst the person on watch holds the watch until they feel the need to change works really well for us. This system worked well for the actual 480 miles traveled to Malta.

Half way across the Ionian Sea our electric generator decided not to work. This was a good lesson. The only real difference to us was that we had to use the main engine to charge the batteries rather than the generator – a detail. (It turned out that the fault was the water pump impeller failing.)

Military warships can travel at great speed. Out of nowhere approximately 80 miles off from Malta one came on the horizon and then promptly disappeared again as quickly as he appeared.

As we approached Valetta, in Malta we had to maneuver through the mass of tankers and freighters at anchor as they waited for further instructions.

We couldn’t understand why the Grand Harbour Marina at Valetta didn’t respond to us on VHF radio on our approach? We radioed several times without success. When this happens it throws stress out in globs! Did they just not reply? Was their radio unmanned at the time? Did our radio break between here and Kythros? Thank goodness for modern aids. We called the marina on our mobile phone and received berthing instructions – they hadn’t heard our radio call.

Valetta is a huge harbor with many finger bays all within a much larger overall bay.
Which finger is ours?