Have Things Gone to Plan?

Let’s go back in time to last October. We’d chosen Licata as our winter home for 2 reasons. Firstly, we wanted to head to the Greek Islands the following Spring and secondly, we wanted to take all the old antifoul off the hull, re-prime and apply new. So, Licata seemed like a good option. And it was, we’d managed to get the work on the hull completed days before Sicily stopped and we all went into hibernation.

We were confined to the boat for weeks and during this time started to question the viability and potential to get locked down on one of the Greek islands. We’d also started to seriously talk about a bigger boat. One more suited to longer ocean passages and capable of cruising in higher latitudes.

At this point we decided that heading East may not be our best option and so we’d head West, in a roundabout way.

As soon as restrictions were eased, we were off. The plan was now to head back to Sardinia, then Corsica, the French coast and across to Catalunya. We’d make our way to Barcelona, or Valencia, or possibly Denia or even Gibraltar (First Mate very keen on visiting Morrisons) for the winter. That changed to include Almerimar. Then changed to discount Barcelona, based on the fact that a boat we’d been keen to see there had been sold day’s before we were due to arrive. Last minute changes were becoming the norm!

The one constant was that Gianti would be put up for sale in the Autumn. We’d been planning how to go about this and had decided that Almerimar was probably the best option to moor her. We could leave her there, return to the UK and had even explored the possibility of renting my daughters flat in Holmfirth, South Yorkshire. The day I contacted her about the idea was the day I found out she’d just put it up for sale!! However, Almerimar still seemed like a reasonable idea.

Meanwhile, the First Mate had mentioned to some good friends that we would be selling Gianti in the Autumn. They asked that we bear them in mind when we came to the sale, though at the time I took this as a nice bit of positive encouragement rather than anything else.

We were sitting in Santa Ponca, Mallorca when we got round to talking to them and I genuinely was taken aback when they said they’d like to buy Gianti if we’d be happy to sell to them. I didn’t really consider the impact of losing our home, transport, gym, workplace, retreat all in one go but it started to sink in.

With that, we decided to change our plans. Again. We’d head to Portugal, back to Lagos and sort everything from there, barring any Covid19 problems of course.

So, things really did go to plan, it’s just that the plan changed. Constantly!

Captain Mac

After the iPad had an involuntary dip in the sea it’s taken a while for everything to get organised. So attached is the video for this last post. Click https://youtu.be/xvB_WGkTMU4 to view it!

Thanks, First Mate … Sarah