Here are my notes from our trip so far:
Flying to Milan to see the boat
Some notes I put down during the flight to Milan…
After several months of intensive preparations the day has come. I'm flying with Gal Oren to see our new boat, Princess Nayeli.
It's hard to describe the sweet feeling of freedom and excitement towards what's expecting us.
The morning started on the right foot when we were able to check-in our luggage without paying overweight, I was upgraded to Business without even asking for it and now I'm sitting in the plane, no emails to read, no presentation to get ready for, just relaxing and dreaming about the beauty of this coming summer. We could see the bay of Venice from the window and the sandy shoreline going south towards Ravenna, which is where we're heading.
I'm still a little confused and I don't think I realize that I can really clear up my mind. It's like an absolute peace of mind where I don't need to worry about 1000 things at work and don't need to think what I forgot to pack or what I forgot to order for the boat. It is what it is at this point and all I can do is sit down and wait to see the results…
Preparations in Ravenna
I'm sitting at the airport in Bologna waiting for the family to arrive. This is after an intensive week of equipping the boat.
Ravenna is quiet dead during the week, especially a rainy week like the one we had. It started to fill up with people towards the weekend and when the weather warmed up.
During the week we went shopping about twice a day. Things were very difficult to find so we kept looking around for shops.
Day after day we installed all the shipments that gradually arrived to the boat. We started at 8am and finished at 10pm most of the days.
While installing the gangway, the flush mount fell into the water.
The water was basically clear, but included a mixture of shipyard dirt, small jelly fish and so on. I decided to jump into this mixture to save the flush mount. Needless to say it was the only one we had and was impossible to find locally that specific size. Fortunately the flush mount was lying next to the quay so it wasn't so deep.
I need to thank Gal Oren who joined me to the initial set-up and made this experience joyful and productive.
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| Princess Nayeli in Ravenna |
Starting to Sail
On Saturday, June 21st, we started to sail. We went north to Venice through Porto Garibaldi. What’s interesting in this part of the Adriatic is that all the shore line is sandy from all the rivers flowing into the sea, so the water is green and very shallow. You can be 5 miles out and only have 7m of water under your keel.
Our biggest problem, with a draught of 2.30m, is that the marinas are dredged to 2m (on low tide). So for example, when we entered Porto Garibaldi, the water was about 2.8m deep. In the morning it was a little over 2m, so we were actually sitting on out keel, that was nicely dug into the sand like a good anchor. To get out of the marina (we couldn’t wait for the tide), we waited till the water was 2.4m and then a group of 8 extremely kind Italians literally pushed us out of the quay. Same happened in the bay of Venice (Chioggia), but this time we insisted to moor in a deeper berth, and they were able to find a 3m deep berth.
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| Princess Nayeli in Italy |
After spending a few days in Venice (which was very hot, but beautiful), we sailed to Slovenia, rented a car for a few days, and drove around. The big Girls (Naama and Noga Shaulsky), had enough with that and wanted to go sailing again.
We are now in Portoroz, our last stop in Slovenia, trying to find an air condition for the boat. The past 10 days were so hot that we decided to give this a higher priority.
Everyone is very happy with the sailing, all the girls feel very well at sea, and we’re all getting along well.
Most chances that we’ll start the Croatian coast tomorrow….
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| Princess Nayeli in Slovenia |
