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On this page, you can find a list of all the blogs we've written. Scroll through the pages to see the older ones. To view them in their various categories, use the main menu bar above where you can find them grouped by the places we've visited and by year. On the Blog Posts menu you can select blogs by the following groups:

  • Life Aboard – our experiences of living on a boat,
  • Boat & Technical Projects – the upgrades and repairs we've made to Emerald,
  • Land Travel – experiences away from the boat,
  • Green Emerald Series – Colin's posts about making Emerald into an off-grid sailing boat,
  • Passage Reports – our experiences during the longer sailing passages.

Latest Blog Post

What Next for Emerald, Having Escaped Porto Santo?

After 20 months in Porto Santo, Emerald’s crew sailed south, docking at Las Palmas for essential repairs, and upgrades. The uncertainty about availability and the return of Med-mooring challenges had a happy ending. We settled into the convenience of marina life, pleasantly surprised by the peacefulness, despite the city setting.

All Posts

Take a browse through the many posts we've written over the last few years as we travel and live on the watery world.

We Are Sailing

We had to head back to Nidri to get some parts to try and fix the leak on our watermaker. Purity and volume were good but we had a bit of weepage out of the ends of the membrane housings. One of the retaining bands around the housings had split […]

Palairos

A short hop from Ormo Varko around the corner brought us to Palairos, also on the mainland. Approaching the small harbour at Palairos we could see the beach to the south with a couple of boats anchored to the north. It looked like there were a few bars lining the […]

Another Week Goes By

We spent the last week anchored in Bungalow Bay (the eastern end of Ormo Varko). We had a bit of boat work to do – sticking on Crazy Horse’s name stickers to our new dinghy, fixing reverse on the outboard, commissioning the watermaker and tracking down a leak on it; […]

Water, Water Everywhere

and we can now make some to drink! When we bought Emerald in America back in 2004, we got a bit over excited in the chandleries there as at the time the dollar to £ was almost 2 to 1. We ended up cramming Emerald with lots of goodies including […]

Crazy Horse and Pony Tales

We’ve not had much luck with the dinghies we’ve owned. First off was the one that came with Emerald, a 3.1m Quicksilver inflatable with wooden floor. It weighed about 3 million tonnes making it a pain to haul up on beaches or onto the davits. After our 3 month trip […]

Lazing on Meganisi

Leaving our Med mooring spot in Ormo Abelike went perfectly, there was barely any wind which helped a lot. As soon as Colin untied the windward stern line, Emerald gently moved forward as the taught anchor chain obeyed the laws of physics (Hooke’s law for those that care) and returned […]

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Emerald is a 1979 Kelly Peterson cutter, our home as we wander slowly around the watery world. This blog provides a place for us to document our travels and the work we do to upgrade and keep her maintained. We hope you enjoy it. To be kept up to date with the […]

Tied to a tree on Meganisi

Doing something for the first time in Emerald can make us a little nervous, particularly if it involves close quarters manoeuvring. So today we set off for our first ‘tying to a tree’ Med mooring adventure with just a little trepidation nibbling away at us. There are three large bays […]

Painted Lady

When we bought Emerald her deck and coachroof had previously been painted using Awlgrip paint. It weathered well but in the last few years had begun to look worn, scratched and faded. We have made a few epoxy repairs to the deck which had to be painted to protect the […]

Fire and Tunes in Bungalow Bay

1st June A couple of weeks in Vlicho Bay and it was time for a change of scenery. We decided to head over to Ormo Varko on the mainland, 6nm northeast of Nydri. A light easterly was blowing and we managed to sail all the way; as we passed the small […]

Lefkada Road Trip

Our friends Pat and Duncan offered to go halves on a car share so off we went for a day tour of Lefkada island. First stop was a walk in the Melissa Gorge (a leaflet describing this and many other walks on Lefkas can be downloaded from here) off the […]

Emerald Green Series Part 2

The sea | the sea | the open sea | The blue, the fresh, the ever free | -”The Sea,” Bryan W. Procter. It is at last time to sit down and write Part II of the green Emerald series. This time I’ll go into detail of our solar panel […]

Nidri and Vlicho

It’s just over a week since we arrived in Greece and we’ve been busy little bees. First was a trip on the bus (€1.60 each way, pay on board) from Nidri to Lefkas to pick up an internet SIM. We went for a Wind SIM which gave us 6GB for […]

Sicily to Greece

Sailing to Greece On Wednesday morning we were up at 5am to set off for Greece. The air smelt of sulphur (Etna was erupting) but there was not a breath of wind. We dawdled about for a while delaying our start, checking and checking again the wind forecasts. It looked […]

Syracuse

The Making of a Syracuse Super Sarnie Last time we were in Syracuse we never got round to trying one of the mega sarnies from the Caseificio Borderi deli at the far end of the daily market. The time had come to make amends so we joined Tree from Tinkerbell amongst […]