Before we left the boys asked me what each day was going to be like while we were away. They wanted to be able to imagine how life would be different on the boat (I also think they were hoping for less school work). I found this question quite hard to answer. We had been…

Schedules are never great, and up until now we’d managed to keep ours at bay. We had a fairly big deadline looming though in that we had to get to Almerimar (south Spain) by the start of October. Just to make things more interesting, I also had to fit a quick trip to the US…

I feel seasick! This didn’t come as too much of a surprise as I knew I was prone to it. It isn’t always bad but it’s always there. I had hoped that after 2 months of sailing that I would have completely adjusted. I haven’t. I really should have prepared more! I did some minor…

Unfortunately housework continues even when you are sailing. Most tasks only vary a little. Cleaning is the same wherever you are, but cooking on a boat is completely different. Cooking on a boat is pretty complicated Getting everything switched on Before you even start you need to turn on the gas for the cooker. There…

We had spent the first couple of weeks of our trip in and out of marinas, so it wasn’t until after our first overnight trip (from Bar to Corfu) that we started to suspect that there was a problem with our house bank of batteries. We have 7 batteries on the boat: 1 x engine…

We left Itea with the same fresh Northerly wind that had been with us for the last couple of days in the harbour, only for it to die out after an hour of sailing. We were still having issues with our batteries so running the engine for a while got some juice back into them…

We’ve been day sailing so far, making between 30 and 60 miles a day, but sooner or later we were going to have to do some longer legs. I’ve sailed at night before, but this would be a first for Jennifer and the boys. We had heard conflicting reports about Albania, and were still a…

Sailing with two boys has many challenges. Keeping them entertained while sailing or motoring can be difficult, especially when Neil has to work and I have to be in charge of steering. At home we relied on tablets, TV, computers when we needed to get things done but with lack of power and Wi-Fi this…

We had finally made it out of marinas the day before, having left Marina Veruda after sorting the arch, and had a short day motoring (no wind) down to Otok Ist, where we picked up a mooring ball and had an entirely quiet night. The next day we set off for Uvala Kosirina, a lovely…

When we bought Hullabaloo she had a pretty decent cruising inventory: AGM batteries, generator, watermaker, gennaker, bimini, cockpit tent, even a chain counter so you can tell how much anchor chain you have out without having to guess or count chain markers. The main thing missing was solar. We were going to be away for…