Ragusa

We've finally made it to sea! Although Elia returned to inform us that our alternator was in perfect working order, he did manage to get his electrician (who was in bed with Covid at the time) to do some remote diagnosis over Skype. He identified that it was actually a secondary voltage regulator hidden under the pilot desk (an area that I'd taken one look at and decided to pretend doesn't exist!) that was causing the problem. Elia disconnected this from the alternator to prevent it overcharging and we were given the go ahead to do some short sails with this temporary fix and the promise that the electrician would try to get to Marina di Ragusa to replace the regulator once he was out of isolation.

With a fair bit of trepidation we fired up the engine and set off to do our first solo sail! Miraculously, it actually went rather smoothly, nothing broke, no-one fell overboard, no-one was sick and most importantly the engine fired back up when we needed it to! A success all round!

We managed a couple of day sails, but one less than planned, as of course, no week is complete without a bit of toilet maintenance. I have to admit, whilst treading water, snorkel mask on and plunger in hand as Sam tackled the outflow pipe from the inside with a sewer spring I did begin to question some of my life choices that had led me to this point. I've also come to the conclusion that either we are very unlucky or the lavac toilet has the world's best PR department as supposedly "The Lavac Toilet has long been a favourite with sailors throughout the world, providing their owners with years of trouble-free use. One of the simplest marine toilets to operate, it requires virtually no maintenance." In their defence it does have very few parts, we've just had a problem with all three of them! On the plus side I now know what I'll have as my specialist subject should I ever go on Mastermind!

Toilet repairs aside Sam managed to fix one of our fans with a bit of soldering and I had my first trip up the mast in the bosun's chair. Entirely unnecessary it turns out, as the "random anchor ball" I went up to retrieve turned out to be a radar reflector, but I had a great time. Sam and the creaking, groaning halyard that had to hoist me up maybe less so.

Whilst waiting for Elia to return we decided to channel our inner Italian and hire a moped for a few days so we could explore inland a bit more. We stopped off at a beautiful vineyard/olive grove with a shop on site and stocked up on local wine. We also visited an amazing Roman villa, originally built in the 3rd century AD and excavated in the 1970s, where a mudslide had almost perfectly preserved the mosaics on the floor.

On day 2 we came to the realisation that the scooter wasn't speed limited at 55kmph as we had initially assumed but the frame of the speedo had melted down blocking the movement of the needle beyond this point, which definitely explained why 55kmph seemed to cover a wide range of speeds!

With that we were over a month in with our first guests due to arrive!Read more