I’m writing this blog sitting in our little rented studio in Limni, Greece, while A B Sea is out on the hard.  I’m feeling poised on a fulcrum between good memories of last year’s sailing season and anticipation for next season.  At the moment, our future plans are sketchy at best.  While we know roughly where we want to be by the end of the 2020 sailing season, how we will get there is still to be determined.  But that’s a fe...

Last week I celebrated my toy boy’s birthday.  Now instead of being 3 years older than him, I’m only two!  This week, along with opening gifts sent to us by Santa and his Amazon helpers, we got some advice on what looked like a weeping keel.

Why’s the keel still wet?

After standing on the hard for a month, we expected A B Sea’s keel to be dry as a bone.  For the most part it was, but there was a patch on each side where wat...

Is it my grey hair, or hobbling with a beach-finds walking stick, or a penchant for all things magical that earned me the name, Gandalf the Merry?  Well, Baz called me Gandalf and I added the ‘Merry’ part, preferring to highlight that aspect of my personality rather than my aging looks leading to the obvious handle of ‘Gandalf the Grey’.

Oh it’s all a barrel of laughs here at A B Sea! 

When we’re not chuckling at my stick-shuffl...

Christmas 2017 in Europe

Our first Christmas away from Australia in 2017 was unusual not only in the fact that we’d left home (actually sold up so we had no home) in Australia, and we were now on the opposite side of the world, 17,196 km (10,685 miles) away from our son Luke.  Everything was so surreal that year, as we literally stepped away from semi-rural family life, leaving Australia on the 18th December 2017, and into the...

We toasted our last night on board – in a golden Greek sunset – thanking all of our subscribers, followers and patrons who are with us “two old farts” as we live our wet grey nomad lifestyle.

After a decent night’s sleep, we woke up to a pretty windless day with calm sea and hazy purple pink light on the horizon as the sun began to rise.  Today was the day A B Sea was getting hauled out.  I was pretty excited at the prospect of...

Be careful what you wish for

Over the past few weeks I’d been having the occasional secret longing to be on terra firma, feeling firm earthy ground beneath my feet, hearing uplifting birdsong, smelling the resin-like fragrance of pine trees.  Standing at the point on the beach where sand, waves, air and sunshine all meet.  Cooking in an oven larger than a shoe box.  Going for long walks when I fancied, by simply stepping out of...

“Malaka” or “Malakas” is a Greek word meaning the English equivalent of “wanker” (to find a fairly acceptable word). It is a much used Greek slang word and I think probably correlates to “bugger” in Australian (as in “you’re a funny bugger” and “stupid bugger”). We’ve heard it a few times when sailing schools take their budding young sailors around harbours in their tiny optimist sailing dinghies. Since our friend Nikos explai...

It was time to leave the beautiful island of Poros as we had to get to our final destination of the sailing season at Limni on the north of Evia, where A B Sea would be hauled out so we could do work on her over winter. 

Leaving Poros we had a pretty uneventful motor as there wasn’t a breath of wind.  However 12 nautical miles away from our first destination of Sounion on the mainland of Greece, the engine suddenly lost 0.7 of...

Exploring Poros

Baz and I visited Poros on our way from Spain to Turkey last year and while we only stayed there overnight, what we saw of Poros town left an impression on me.  So when the anchorage at Kavouri on the Greek mainland became untenable due to high winds putting us on a lee shore (again – see last week’s blog), we decided to head south west and revisit Poros.

Staying for a few days in Russian Bay at Poros Island mean...

Did you know that Baz used to be a well-known DJ in Tenerife, Canary Islands in the 80s and 90s? We met when I was 22 and he was a mere 19 years old and he was DJ-ing then at weddings, clubs and pubs.  We set up home together in the UK after living and working in the south of France, but it didn’t work out as we were trying to settle down too soon, too young. 

I went on my own adventures and Baz headed over to Tenerife, wo...