The master plan

It really is ambitious for two people who don't know how to swim

As the great Khloe Kardashian once said: “If you want to make god laugh, tell him your plans.” Well, God, this one’s for you. Let it be known that no spontaneous-seeming sailing sabbatical is complete without a highly detailed Excel spreadsheet. 

Charlie really has gone above and beyond in this department. Night after night, he sits hunched over his HP laptop, mapping out our route in meticulous detail like he is Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind developing the principles of game theory (though mercifully without the schizophrenic episodes or altercations involving Russian secret agents). 

This month - god willing - these plans will finally swing into action, when we touch down in Preveza, western Greece, where the Turtle lays waiting. I am extremely excited about this: Greece imo is THE best spot for sailing. Not that I’ve sailed to many places. But why would I when there’s Greece? The islands! The water! The feta! The goats! Really, the place is heaven. 

Be that as it may, we’ll be speeding out of there faster than you can say “mine’s a Mythos and a large gyros please mate”. New Brexit rules dictate that no UK citizen can spend more than 90 days in the EU within an 180 day period. Tricky when you’re planning a six month sojourn around the Mediterranean. So, we’re undertaking a highly technical manoeuvre known to those in the sailing community (hi friends!) as the “Schengen Shuffle” - essentially cruising around non-EU states as much as possible to stay on the right side of the law. 

This means that, within days of arriving in Greece, we’ll head straight to Turkey, which - luckily for us - is run by an autocrat with an attitude problem and is thus not an EU member. Hmm, sounds familiar. As even more luck would have it, the east coast of Turkey is lovely - and very much like the west coast of Greece, with turquoise waters, pine-fringed coves and a positively thriving goat population. 

Of course, we will return to Greece at some point. One can only resist the siren’s call of spanakopita for so long. We spent a delightful week sailing around the Dodecanese last summer. Highlights included visiting a Greek discoteque housed in an abandoned village that almost exclusively played Enrique Iglesias, riding quad bikes into the crater of a volcano that smelled of egg - and even befriending a herd of highly inquisitive goats. So, as you can imagine, we are most eager to return.

We also plan to cruise to the Cyclades - the island group that’s home to Mykonos and Santorini (although we’ll likely steer clear of these spots bc they are full of cruise ships and Greek salads cost about €50). Instead, we’ll head for Skiathos, where Charlie’s family tend to kick back in the summer (posh people, eh?). More importantly still, it’s where that church scene in Mamma Mia was filmed. You know, the one with the donkey. 

Once I’ve had my Meryl Streep moment, we’ll be off around the Peloponnese, through the Ionian islands and - eventually - to Albania, with its rugged coastline, picturesque villages and non-EU regulations. According to Conde Nast Traveller, there is such a place as the “Albanian Riviera” and we look forward to discovering whether it actually exists or is in fact, as we suspect, the creation of clever marketing and photoshop. But we live in hope! 

From here, if we’re still talking to each other, we’ll cruise to Montenegro, then Italy, then the Balearics, where we hope to pootle around Majorca, Menorca and Ibiza for a few weeks - gathering our strength for ~the scary bit~. 

Going into any more detail about this part of the trip feels too much like tempting fate, so I’ll save the specifics for another time. But to give you a taster… the plan involves cruising down the coast of Morocco - dodging a pod of wrathful killer whales in the process - then on to the Canary Islands and Cabo Verde, an island group 400 miles off the west coast of Africa. From here - gulp - we hope to hop across the Atlantic (and by this point I’ll almost certainly know which side starboard is). 

Obviously there are many (many!!!!) factors that could play havoc with these plans, so do ingest them with a pinch of salt. But with fair weather and a following wind, we’ll spend winter in the Caribbean - reuniting with friends and family members who hope to fly over. Flying, eh? How terribly common. 

Thank you so much for reading this post (especially you, God. Hope it made you cackle).

NEXT TIME! Provisioning. I reveal just how many tea bags we plan to pack. PLUS: An exclusive look at Charlie’s fishing lure collection.