36.22.388N 10.32.741E

At last a good weather window appeared and we managed to leave Cagliari . We planned to leave around 4am, however the cats tried to persuade us to stay by running around our boat and onto other boats. We eventually left at 5am. Our apologies to everyone in the marina that were woken up with calls of “Yoyo come here”.

The weather conditions were perfect for the whole passage. We had around 10-15 knots of wind aft of the beam for the whole passage. The wind kindly changed direction to stay in the same relative position as we rounded Cap Bon. We arrived 5pm the following day which meant the passage time was 36 hours. We averaged 6 knots.

The cats were not too bad. Koshka easily slept the whole 36 hours, although he did once visit us in the cockpit. He wasn’t too happy we would not let him explore the boat, so after a few minutes he went back to bed and more sleep. He celebrated arriving by having a couple of hours on deck exploring and taking in the sights. This was obviously quite exhausting as he then went back to bed and slept. Yoyo was not quite sea sick but she did drool a bit. However after several hours she recovered and was relatively happy, eating, washing herself and even playing a little bit. Unlike previous passages she spent most of the time down below.

We had lots of boats to avoid overnight around the cape. At one point we were tracking 6 boats all within 6nm, however we needed surprisingly few alterations to our course to avoid them all. Due to the shipping we were often both on watch and not sleeping very much.

We did nearly get caught in a fishing net. Fortunately our boat has a wire that runs from the bottom of the keel to the skeg (part of the rudder), the theory is that any fishing nets stay down away from the propeller. On this occasion the theory worked and we didn’t get caught on it. A few minutes later the sea gulls played a joke on us by sitting in a line on the water pretending to be another net!

In the morning we had a call from the Tunisian navy vessel. All went well and we even managed to correctly spell our boat name phonetically (twice as they wanted it repeated).

When we arrived we berthed alongside and visited customs and immigration. We were pleasantly surprised no one asked for any bakshish. The customs lady did visit the boat but didn’t like cats and so stayed by the entrance. The search of the boat consisted of me bringing things to show her!

The only slight mishap happened when we left the wall and the dingy got caught on a bollard. We managed to rip the bolt out through the floor of the dinghy so we will now need to fiberglass it back it. The stern too berthing did go perfectly. In hindsight our only excuse was we were tired and not paying attention.

We berthed up, showered, had a small meal and an early night, totally shattered from passage.