Malta is up next, we arrived there in mid-August 2015 after leaving Crete. Will post photos but need to find a place that has not-terrible wifi. In Bangkok right now and the hotel I'm at has fairly sketchy wifi, not good enough for uploading a bunch of photos. Heading to Hanoi in a couple of days, hopefully better internet there and I can catch up closer to present day.

Check out Palawan, PH if you want to keep diving. My favorite by far over Phuket, Koh Samui, etc.

Great to see you're doing well, safe travels.

Thanks Bo, appreciate the rec.



The sail from Crete to Malta was relatively short and uneventful, other than landing that sweet tuna. We had the usual sick sunsets:



and a smooth ride the entire way, which was not a very long distance, less than 1k kilometers. We covered it in just a few days with good winds.

Malta is made up of a few large islands. We initially stayed at the larger southern island, also called Malta, then headed up to a smaller northern island, Gozo. Malta (the island) is the main island, and has the capital Valleta, which is where we docked the boat:



and did most of our exploring from. We took some bus rides around the island and did a bunch of walking in the capital.

There are lots of colorful boats there, the Maltese love to paint them bright colors:



The islands are not very large, but they are packed with buildings and history. Unfortunately for the Maltese, they are in a strategic military location, so they've had to deal with a lot of invaders over their history. They have lots of cannons and things like that:



My takeaway from Malta is that it is very dry and hot. We were there during August, so it was even drier and hotter. Very few people would walk around during mid-day, the streets and walkways were close to empty:



then things would liven up at nightfall, when everyone would come out and sit around hanging out and chatting and eating octopus pizza.

We took a trip by taxi to a large grocery store for provisions, and I came across this gem, for those who like Las Vegas:



I have an entire collection of goofy named product photos. This one fit right in.


There was a deal at the store where if you spent a certain amount of money, you got a free bottle of water. As we had hung out in Malta for a bit and hadn't really fully provisioned before leaving Greece, this translated to:



which is fine, other than all the accumulated plastic after we drank our way through most of it. Always nice to have more drinking water.

We took water taxis in Valletta a few times, due to our port being pretty far away from everything. The water taxis cost about 2 euro, and the competition is super fierce. Here are two guys that actually came to blows fighting for our business:



They were swinging oars at each other, etc. Was pretty crazy. The old dude on the right was mad that the young dude on the left wasn't waiting his turn or something like that. Lots of yelling.

Lest you think I was making that up about the octopus pizza:



stuff was bonkers good.

After finishing up our provisioning, we headed up to the much less populated north island, Gozo. Sailing along the islands provided some dramatic views. Either of forts and dried up looking buildings, or huge cliffs:



with sick dropoffs straight down into the water.

Some of them had little caves or swim thrus:



you can see a kayaker going through that one.

We found an old cruise ship mooring next to one of the cliffs, and decided to try our luck. We figured if it was build to hold a cruise ship in place, it would have no problem holding our little sailboat:



It's a huge floating foam tire, basically. Bolted into the bottom of the ocean. They originally installed it to encourage cruise ships to stop there, but someone didn't do the math correctly, and it was installed too close to the coastline for cruise ships to approach, so it just sits there now.

That was a bit of a tricky one to lock on to. Due to the size of the float, you can't really pass a line through it without someone climbing onto the float itself. This meant we got very close, then I hopped off, they threw me a line, and I tied us off. There were a few different ways to tie off. We could tie off against the side of the boat, which the owners didn't want to do because they didn't want the float rubbing the side of the boat. We instead tied off a line from each of the bow cleats, which I was a little skeptical of doing.

Turns out that method didn't work so well, as the float ended up in between the two hulls again and again. We eventually abandoned this spot because of that.

The next spot was much, much better. We anchored in what looked very much like a collapsed volcano. Imagine a high "C" with a narrow opening. Very protected from the outside sea. Here's another ship sailing in after we had already entered and dropped anchor:



that vessel is about 40ft long, to give an idea of scale.

Here's a view from the shore looking down into the not-actually-a-volcano:



and one more, turned about 90 degrees to the right from the previous photo:



ours is the catamaran with the yellow tarp over it. It's meant to be a shade cover to reduce the heat. The cat is 60ft long to give you an idea of scale again.

Other than that opening you see, and one other smaller one, the entire not-volcano was completely protected by those cliffs. Made it really easy to just jump off the boat and go snorkeling around without worrying about current, etc.

There wasn't much to see on Gozo. We did take a spin around in one of those open top buses:



but mostly we just explored the coastline and did some snorkeling. Took the dingy through some caves and swim-thrus:



and enjoyed nature for a week or so.

After enjoying our time in the not-volcano, it was time to head north to Sicily. It wasn't a long trip, only a single day of sailing, but I still rigged up the fishing gear again:



The blue line goes out into the water and has the lure attached. The white bungee cord absorbs the shock of any strikes. The blue line is still attached to the boat, but slack due to the tension being on the white bungee. The neon yellow line is attached to the tensioned line and has a soda can with some coins in it hanging off the table. When a fish hits the lure, the blue line is pulled back, the bungee stretched back, and the soda can yanked upward suddenly, causing the coins inside to rattle around and serve as an alarm. When that happens, I run over, grab the blue line, and start pulling the fish in.

We didn't catch anything that passage, sadly. But what a set up!

Our port in Sicily was Ragusa, which is on the southern coast:



Nice sunsets there:



First meal was obviously a four cheese pizza, which Sicily is famous for:



got LeBron in there as well keeping an eye on things. Top notch stuff. I approve of Sicilian pizza.

Pretty decent marina we were at, complete with a large leave-one take-one bookshelf:



These are popular at transient-heavy marinas. Think of it as a free book exchange. This one was in the laundry room.

Sicily is pretty large and I wanted to go exploring (including going to Corleone because Godfather), so I rented a little car for some travels:



and the boat owners quickly enlisted me as a driver to some Michelin restaurant they had their eye on. I'm not much for fancy dining, more of a street food person. Too many adjectives at the fancy pants places for my tastes:



usually seems to me that your ego is being served more than your stomach is. Was not really impressed, and the owners later agreed they weren't, either. Who wants to eat wheat-flavored ice cream, really? Oh I'm sorry, it's "smoked wheat" ice cream. Can't forget those extraneous adjectives.

so you're saying the icy green broad bean flour didn't make for an excellent after dinner tomato flavored sponge cake?

I certainly didn't enjoy it.

Give me a fresh caught fish on the grill any day over those abominations.


One of the cool things about being in Sicily was that my cousin flew in to help crew the boat to Sardinia. While I have no issue crewing with friends or strangers, it's always nice to chill with family as well. He showed up a few days after we arrived, just in time to join in for a drive around Sicily.

Sicily has always intrigued me for some reason, so I was very interested in getting out of the marina and exploring. That's the reason I rented the car, my plan was to take 4 days or so and just drive a circuit around all of Sicily. There are only about 5 million people in Sicily over an area of about 10k square miles, so it's entirely feasible to just spend about a week or so exploring and cover most of it.

After my cousin showed up, we took off with one of the owners for a big clockwise loop starting in Ragusa, which is in the south central part of the island. Most of this section of the island is very dry, so there isn't much to see other than dirt cliffs.

My real plan was to crush gelato every day. It was not hard to find gelato places, they are everywhere:



in every single town or city. When nothing else is open, the gelato place is open. You can order your gelato in a cup, or in a sweet bread roll. I guess that's the Sicilian version of a cone.

The tough part is having to choose which flavor you want. This was my favorite:



although the raspberry next to it was calling my name. I found a cannoli flavored at one tiny village in the middle of nowhere, smashed that in a bread roll.

We also made sure to stop at as many small hole in the wall neighborhood restaurants as we could. Here's a typical one:



You could order off the menu, or go for the buffet, which is what all those dishes in the center are.

Here is a typical pasta seafood dish:



with in-house pasta, which turned out to be somewhat standard. The pasta in Sicily was marvelous. Much thicker than what I'm used to from USA#1, and it chewed differently. Not sure how to describe the latter. It was more.. I don't know.. breadlike? It went better with the sauces than in USA#1, more complimentary.

The italians take their desserts very seriously. One of the hotels we stayed at had a very pleasant breakfast area surprise:



Yes, that's a sorbet machine. I went back twice, at the expense of additional cannoli.

The edges of the island are mostly the same - salty, cliffy, dry, and brown. They have a fairly large salt farming area in the west:



and there are stands along the road where you can buy little bags of Sicilian salt and things made out of salt like tiny animal sculptures. Raking salt fields in the middle of the August heat seems like a pretty terrible job, I felt bad for those guys.

Of course, this being Sicily, there are infinite grapes and vineyards everywhere. We would constantly drive through them:



because I was keeping us off the highways and on the smaller roads.

Here's a dude taking his haul of grapes somewhere. The thing he's tugging behind him is an enormous container of grapes:



and you can see more vineyards in the distance. I'm not a wine drinker, but my cousin and the owner that went with us are. They availed themselves to many tastings in various places that we stopped, and when we got back to the boat, we came back with a bunch of bottles of wine.

The landscape is different in the center of the island, which we detoured in and out of as we drove. Much more hilly, and a bunch of actual trees:



but still lots and lots of vineyards. Vineyards everywhere. Not much livestock, which surprised me. I figured there would be a ton of cows, but we didn't really see many until we got up in the north central and north east parts of the island.

Our circuit around the island took a detour as we got into the north central area, because I wanted to check out Corleone. I know it's a 100% loltourist thing to do but I didn't care because Godfather.

Corleone turned out to be a standard small town up in the hills. Tiny, tiny streets, like most of the Sicilian towns we went through. Very few people out during the daytime due to the heat. Lots of action and life once the sun went down. Only a few Godfather themed things, so not overly egregious.

The pasta stereotype exists for a reason. Here's part of a tiny supermarket in Corleone that we stopped at:



That area encompasses about 35% of the entire shop.

The pizza stereotype is the same. Here's a look at a pizza spot in Corleone that we stopped at for a slice:



very, very busy. We were eating our slices in the small courtyard area outside and struck up some chats with a few Italians who spoke English. Everyone was very welcoming and friendly.

A trip into the Corleone pharmacy yielded this photo:




We only stayed a night in Corleone, and continued onward back toward the northern coastline. Here's what a standard coastal town looked like:




and here's some coastal food, buffet style:



The plate is overloaded because the way they did the buffet was to allow a single trip, with a single plate. My plate was actually underloaded relative to what the average plate looked like. Some were stacked comically high. Lots of food made it to the floor that way as people tried to get their leaning tower of pastas back to their table.

They do calamari right in Sicily:



minimal coating is the clearly superior choice. These were bonkers.

Holy hell, Sicily looks great. On the bucket list!

I didn't take the time to head up to Sicily when I was in Malta last year, and you're now making me wish I had. That calamari looks fantastic. Plus, I like LeBron.

that pulpo makes me wish i was back in liguria

Nice update!! Looks like a blast!

hope you ate a lot of arancini. coming out of a bar in palermo drunk at midnight, walking into a bakery next door and biting into a piping hot arancini con ragù was an unforgettable experience.

I saw Neil Degrasse Tyson last year. Telling about a conference he went to in Italy somewhere, he noticed the pasta thing in the stores.

He asked his Italian counterparts what they were surprised by when they went to stores in USA #1. The top answers were the cereal and soft drink aisles.

Seems like Italy's one up on us.

The Sicilians take their gelato very seriously. In more than a few of the gelato places, we'd see gelato diplomas hanging on the wall, much like doctors and lawyers hang their diplomas up in their offices:




That one was from a gelato place high up in the mountains:



where we drove around on some extremely narrow streets and tight hills. I wasn't sure the little Panda was going to make it up a few of those hills.

We fed little Panda a steady diet of Six Legged Firebreathing Dog juice:



although there was some debate on whether or not that was a dog or a lion (wtf?!) between my cousin and I. There is no way that's a lion. It's very clearly a dog. It's the logo for Eni, an energy company, and if you've ever been to Italy, you've seen their gas stations everywhere.

If you look in the lower right of that photo, you'll see a dude sitting in the back of his hatchback. He's selling those tomatoes that are in the crate on the side of the road. This was a fairly common thing.

A little over halfway through our circuit, I found what has to be the ultimate gelato flavor:



just doesn't seem possible to have a flavor superior to sicilian cannoli, does it? It's like they took the two best Sicilian desserts and voltroned them.

We had a very long day of driving on the day that I snapped that SLFBD photo. Long enough that we actually stayed at the gas station for the night. This was something I don't think I'd seen before - the gas station had its own hotel.

I've seen gas pumps incorporated into hotels before, but I've never seen a national chain gas station that had its own hotel. It was pretty decent, too. Had a restaurant that we ate rabbit at while a dog wandered through the tables looking for scraps. Instead of a bread basket, they gave us a small burlap sack full of breads. Good times.

Our circuit around Sicily ended back in Ragusa. I returned the car to the marina agent, got some laundry done, and we prepped up the boat for the ~450nm (700km) trip to Sardinia and headed out:



Sardinia is kind of like a less well known Sicily. Another huge island off the coast of Italy, this one to the west of Italy. Sicily is to the SW. This meant our course was NW, and that it would take us about 3-4 days to get there. Our destination was on the southern central part of Sardinia.

The trip was mostly uneventful, and it was awesome to have my cousin along for the ride. Shifts are a lot less taxing with 4 people instead of 3. With 3 people, everyone had two 4-hour shifts per day. With 4 people, everyone has two 3-hour shifts per day. It may not seem like that extra hour matter much, but when you're on watch in the middle of the night, time goes by a lot faster when you're only there for 3 hours.

We did have one interesting experience a day or so outside of Sardinia. Interesting being a relative term. We hit a lightning storm at one point in the night that lasted about 6 hours. The storm was averaging a strike every 12 seconds, so it was pretty much continuous. It was pretty crazy, and we loaded all of our essential electronics into the oven, as it acts as a Faraday cage. The sea conditions themselves weren't that bad, but they were somewhat sloppy, and combined with the nonstop lightning, I can understand how most people would find the experience somewhat harrowing.

The closest strike I saw was about 45ft/15m away from the boat, which is very, very close. Probably the closest I've ever been to a lightning strike. Some of our electronics acted a little funky after that one. Glad my phone was in the oven when that one hit.

While I found this to be a pretty cool experience, that opinion was not really shared by the other three. My cousin in particular has a minor lightning phobia (which you'd never think to look at him, as he's a super tough all conditions outdoorsman), so it was pretty much hell for him. It was most likely going through this lightning storm that caused the owners to decide to ship their boat back across the Atlantic instead of sailing it as planned. He was mostly OK with it, but she was pretty shaken.

Not going to forget that night for a while. Unfortunately no video or photos because my phone was tucked away in the cage.

The final day was a smooth approach into this marina:



which we celebrated with a marina restaurant meal. I went with squid ink pasta:



one of my all time favorites. This is dangerous to eat if you care at all about your clothing. The ink loves to get everywhere and stains instantly. I had a black tongue for two days. Worth it!

We quickly started exploring the town of Cagliari where the marina was:





including one day that we walked about 9 miles total, just in and around most of Cagliari. Smashed a few gelatos here and there, and was somewhat horrified to encounter this:



yes, both Facebook and WhatsApp flavored gelato.

wtf Sardinia

I went with coconut.

There were some solid sunsets to enjoy:



and some of the locals had some kind of kayak basketball league thing going on:



which was fun to watch for a while. Multiple people flipped.

I feel like I'm never going to catch up to present day. I just looked at the Mallorca photos that I was planning to post, and there are like 40-50 of them. Then we still have Singapore, Fiji, New Caledonia, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Maldives, Thailand, and Vietnam. And in three weeks I'll be in Hong Kong, then in the Solomons with no internet a week after that.

Four months and change from the Solomons to Singapore via PNG, Brunei, Indo, and Malaysia with little to no internet throughout, absent probably some decent internet in Bali for a week.



In good news, I got my passport back from the Indonesian embassy in Hanoi yesterday, and I'm good to go with a visa for Indonesia now. Some other logistics stuff to take care of before I meet up with the boat, but it's mostly just buying random things like doxycycline (lolmalaria), more lightweight shirts/pants (my clothing is finally starting to fall apart), and sundries, etc.

Was really hoping to find some discounted Columbia clothing here in Vietnam, as this is where they make the stuff, but no love so far. Infinite North Face stuff, mostly knockoffs, but I really want Columbia if I can get it because I like their stuff. I suppose it doesn't really matter if it's likely to end up being a fake anyway. Just want a bunch of lightweight stuff with sun and mosquito protection functionality.

Also should make a decision on whether or not I want to pick up a GoPro in Hong Kong considering we'll be doing a fair bit of diving in Indonesia. Probably should, but I'm super resistant to adding any additional weight or bulk to my backpack. Which is starting to tear, and I suppose I need to sew a patch on it pretty soon. I thought REI was supposed to be good stuff but I'm not that impressed with my Coyote 70L. To be fair, it has taken a pretty good beating.

The Facebook and WhatsApp flavored gelato is kinda annoying and genius at the same time.

That calamari looks insane.

The urge to make calamari is high.

Facebook gelato sent me on gelato tilt, cannot tell a lie.

Calamari was confirmed insane. Super light breading is the ultimate calamari prep.


Calamari was an option in Sardinia as well, but it wasn't the only option:



Yep, that's horse on the menu. Italians have no problem eating Mr. Ed.

I mostly stuck to seafood, because hey, island in the Med, what else are you going to really want to eat?



On one hand I feel bad eating something as intelligent as an octopus. On the other hand, they taste really good.

Horse eating isn't the only USA#1 taboo that Italians ignore. They also have no problem showing you the face of whatever you want to eat. This is from a grocery store meat counter:



That's his ear sticking up in the upper left. Was tough to get a face shop given the angle, but you can see that's the entire pig.

From the same grocery store, more horse if you don't want to have to go to a restaurant to chow down on old Phar Lap:



I stuck to seafood, because island. No moral issues with eating horse, but it's really tough to turn down squid and octopus in the Med.

After eating most of the squid in Sardinia, I dropped my cousin off at the airport and the owners and I set off for Mallorca:



which is one of the Balearic islands owned by Spain, just off their central east coast. The Balearics are very popular with euro tourists, and you've probably heard of at least one of them - Ibiza. Mallorca is kind of like Ibiza for grown ups - older crowd, better infrastructure, less full moon parties. Lots of stunning scenery.

Our sail over was very smooth, just a few days during a solid weather window. No lightning storms or crazy seas. We pulled up in Palma, the main city, and parked ourselves in their primary port:



We were docked right near the bow of that monstrosity in the center that you see covered in white plastic.

Internet access was garbage to nonexistent, as it usually is at marinas. The walk into town was only a few minutes, mostly just getting out of the boatyard area. I went exploring and was able to quickly add another dog sign to my collection:



love this one! Never seen the stream drawn out like that before. Good job, Spain!

While checking my map app (maps.me, an open source vector map that works offline), I noticed something marked as "The Device To Root Out Evil", so I knew I'd have to check that out. Turned out to be this:



which seems appropriate.

There were also some big ass pigeons nearby, which I also liked:



was pretty surprised to not see anyone playing on them.

This was on my way to a local grocery store to check out food possibilities for provisioning the Atlantic run. The owners hadn't told me yet that they had decided to cancel that part of the sail, so I was still on the lookout for the goods.

One interesting thing I found was this:



These are microwaveable packages of food that don't need refrigeration which is standard, but what is not standard is that some include meat. Usually any kind of preserved unrefrigerated pop-in-microwave stuff does not include meat, so this was a pretty sick find, and I was very excited.

Meat is almost always either frozen/refrigerated or canned, and fridge/freezer space on a sailboat is always at a premium. The regular approach to easy meals is to buy stuff like this (which is almost always meatless), then add canned meat to it. I bought a few and brought them back to the boat to try. There were a dozen different kinds, including paella with chicken, some kind of octopus something or other, and more.

If you're on a boat with a microwave, stuff like this is mana from heaven, because it's about a gazillion times easier to just pop something in the microwave for 90 seconds than it is to plan ahead, defrost the meat, go through the prep steps, turn on the stove, do the cooking, not spill stuff, turn off the stove (I include the stove bits because they are usually propane and it's kind of a pain to deal with), do the cleaning, etc. I love me a microwaveable meal, especially on any kind of difficult passage where you are just beat to **** by the weather and sailing conditions.

Palma has a lot of history and interesting buildings and castles and stuff like that. I don't have any photos of those to share because lolhistoricalstuff but I can show you a photo I took when I semi-reluctantly accompanied one of the owners up to a castle for a lookabout:



That's right. The urinals have covers.

wtf!

I was so meh about checking out the castle, only to find this in the restroom near the ticket counter. Made the entire trip worthwhile. Have you ever seen such a thing?

Maybe I've just been around OOT for too long, but who in their right mind is actually going to touch those lids to open and close them?

We also checked out the promenade area, which I won't bore you with photos of, but I will show you this one:



He's taking a text break from walking around selling fake designer bags. These guys were unobtrusive about it, they'd just walk around holding all their bags, and if you made eye contact, they'd approach with a soft sell. Far less aggressive than the average illegal street vendor I'm used to.

Here are a few of them having a board meeting in a local park:



I kept wondering where they bought sacks that huge. Look at those things. They were made of tough material, too. Not plastic.

Food on the promenade was overpriced as is expected, but when these showed up, I didn't really mind getting gringoed:





octopus with chile and seafood paella. Not much of a bivalve fan, but when in Palma..

The big chunks on the lower right of the paella are fish. Had the veggie paella on a different day and thought it was superior. You never know until you try.

nice reports!

Very much appreciated and looking forward to every new post

Never seen those covers. Who would think that's a good idea?

Mallorca is very popular in Germany btw, sometimes referred to as the 17th state. There are 16, for example Bavaria or Berlin. I feel all weird never having been to the island. Supposed to be beautiful for cycling and hiking.