Valletta, Malta

Position:   35:54:02N      14:31:23E

15^th July, 3013

We were met at the marina with very professional dockhands and were soon berthed and facilities connected.

There were now jobs to be arranged.
We needed to arrange for the VHF radio to be checked.
The generator to be checked
The main engine to be serviced.
The Propane gas to be replaced
The gel coat to be checked
The hull under the waterline to checked.
The prop and prop shaft to be checked.
A Malta mobile phone SIM card to be purchased

.. and then we could play

CHECK !

Virtually everything was arranged by the end of the day. The various trades would be arriving over the next few days to action the various jobs, or, the odd job might be left until we reach Gozo, a few miles north of Malta..

In the end the only unsatisfactory result was that the radio was confirmed as working very well, the marina insisted that they both had their radio ON and where listening ON the appropriate channel at the time in question.
Hmmm.. I’m not happy with this.

Valletta, is the capital of Malta and a city full of history for such a small island. We spend several days exploring the various museums and government buildings before exploring further afield. You get the local water taxi over to the old city from our marina if you are sensible as the size of Valletta harbor is such that it would take ages to fight the traffic around the road system. (There are many quality tourist books detailing the colourful history of Malta – this is not the place to copy them.)

Malta has a very inexpensive and comprehensive bus network and so we spent most of our time visiting other places via the buses – anyway they are always fun to travel on.

One day we took the bus to the ‘Blue Grotto’ a set of caves carved out by the sea into the side of the cliffs with fantastic shapes and colours. Other days we visited the various beaches and sights around the island. Of particular note was the old city of Mdina. A long time ago Mdina was the capital of Malta. This quirk of fate has provided with a an old city of historic interest preserved extraordinary well today.

One sultry evening after a walk around the town surrounding our marina we just had to stop for a beer and a snack. It just so happened that at the table next to us Jim and Susie were visiting Malta from the UK for a few days. We chatted. It turned out that Jim and Susie have an apartment in Madeira and they would be there at about the same time that we would be there.
We exchanged email addresses and promised to contact each other if we did indeed stand a chance of being in Madeira at the same time – how cool is that?

We needed to be in Gozo for the 26^th July. This is where we had decided to leave our boat for the month of August whilst we fly back to Canada and visit friends and relatives in the UK.

After short sail north along the eastern coastline we anchored in a fun active bay known as Mellieha Bay. It would then be a very short sail to the Mgarr Marina in Gozo when we chose to pop there.