the month of August 2008

hello one and all.

well, it has been quiet here on the journal front for very good reasons, of which i shall attempt to fill in some of the gaps over time.

The beginning of the month saw me sending mum back to OZ on the big jet plane. the first day of the month i refuelled Titanium (the champagne coloured one usually parked in Monaco) and collected a live body from the big boat for the passage from Monaco to Sardinia via the blurry coastline of French Corsica.

the weather was exceptional and we arrived and parked among the teeth like set up of anchor chains that tangle the unwary down the bottom end of porto vecchio on the transit/tender dock.

the hills around Porto cervo have the brooding dark green of Mediterranean summer infilled with the pastel terracotta and lime and yellows that are so much a part of the area. Boat after boat pull in and the entrance to the harbour is always crowded with vessel coming, going, anchoring or fuelling and if you have no business to do at around 11am or 4pm, don't get in the way. Dominico in his little rubber boat whizzes around at such speed and with incredible accuracy that he looks like a spinning top when he changes direction to attend to another cleary imminent disaster.

We were dragged out of our comfy spot in a howling hooley one day and i managed to drag 3 boats along for the ride on my rudder but no harm no foul, i was not the first and certainly not the last to do it and at least i could blame the wind! the boss wanted me to take his son and grandsons for a dive one day and we ended up tied off to the rock below the lighthouse (not entirely legal) but they all enjoyed themselves.

the water was the sapphire blue of the clean deep ocean and i even managed to get in a swim on the pretext of checking the propeller.

We hung around Sardinia for a couple of weeks before the boss decided that Capri sounds nice, so we headed for the mainland of italy and when i came into phone range, the blackberry gave a beep to tell me that 22 messages were awaiting me.

Apparently halfway across it was decided that i should fly to Beirut and deliver Lightning, the silver one, to Istanbul. One of teh messages was my flight details for the next afternoon.

On arrival in Beirut, we loaded up the storage items and lit out toward Cyprus. another gorgeous run and we landed just after lunchtime, with enough time to refuel and then grab a ride with our agent down to Limissol and pick up a driver to see the bottom part of the island. We hit the ruins in a town called Paphos and saw some incredible mozaics from the roman times, tombs for kings, stopped at a street full of Cyprus Delight sellers (same as turkish delight but the names have been changed to protect the not so innocent) we stopped to see where Aphrodite was supposedly born from the surf and then headed up into the mountains to enjoy a typical Cypriot meal that our agent Ali and his wife Georgia whipped up for us.

Quite a late evening but worth every exhausting moment dragging ourselves back to the boat for another early departure for Turkey - tbc

Aug 29, 2008

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