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Malta: Mgarr Town Gozo to Blue Lagoon (Tuesday 12/06/2018)

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Waking in Mgarr Town Marina there seemed little rush to leave. Children change the character of a sailing holiday. They do not tolerate the early starts, long passages and late-night drinking that usually forms the liver-bruising itinerary of a week at sea. Meals become orderly affairs with three courses, cutlery and a selection of most major food groups; the sailing ceases to be an endurance sport and the night-life takes on more sedate character. Gone are the raucous small hours during which the pinnacle of entertainment is measured by how many hysterical adults can squeeze into a coin operated children’s ride. Our destination was a stone’s throw away and there was time for some exploring. Mgarr town extended up a steep incline topped by several churches whose spires poked tantalisingly over the crest of the hill. Mgarr Cathedral - Might be Arundel though... The harbourside was a tumbledown collection of dilapidated working structures, marked out by peeling pa...
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Malta: St Paul's Bay to Mgarr Town Gozo (Monday 11/06/2018)

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North of Malta and south of Gozo lies the small island of Comino and its own satellite, Cominetto. Between them is a spit of white sand, a rocky corridor of low cliffs and a shallow inlet of clear water. This is The Blue Lagoon. Brooke - meet flamingo. But all is not well in paradise; the terribly awful 1980 Brooke Shields' vehicle of the same name was filmed here. But nowhere in the story will you find her paddling her inflatable flamingo between flotillas of giant day trip boats, battling swarms of sunburnt tourists or suffering the cross-legged indignity of a half kilometre queue for a porta-loo. If there was a 1980's burger van selling deep-fried Spangles, it stayed firmly behind the camera. The channels between the four islands are barely a mile wide and so, after breakfast, it was a short hop from St Paul’s Bay, around the north-eastern headland and into the inlet. Finding little room to park the boat and even less prospect of somewhere to sit on dry land...
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Malta: Valletta to St Paul's Bay (Sunday 10/06/2018).

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The night time breeze picked up and the yacht's stern-lines rubbed loudly in the darkness. In the absence of rope... By 2am it was too much, and in the cramped aft cabin, I silently ransacked the suitcase in a fruitless search for some ear plugs that I knew I hadn’t packed. By 3am I had jerry-rigged a temporary solution using all my underwear and yesterday’s string of Maltese dog sausages. Mercifully, the rubbing stopped, but with pants that smelled so tantalising, I spent a week batting away every wet nose in Malta that made a bee-line for my groin. Not satisfied with a two hundred euro shop only ten hours before, when morning finally came, I was dispatched to find fresh bread. I ambled along the quayside as the church bells of Birgu pealed and before long the smell of baking led me to its source.  As I walked through the door, the Victorian oven was opened and row after row of crackling loaves were piled unceremoniously onto the waiting marble.  Round loa...
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Malta: London to Valletta (Saturday 09/06/2018)

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I volunteered to book our summer holiday. How different things could have been. A fter a strong start, assembling a crew with the promise of nautical shenanigans in the Adriatic, things began to stutter. Somewhere between my first casual enquiry and my disbelieving return to the Easy Jet website, my cookies had been crunched. Bristol/Split flight prices had snuck away from the terminal and were rapidly approaching cruising altitude; the charter bill had ballooned to super-yacht dimensions, but h owever big the boat was, I knew I had missed it. D odging difficult questions while urgently formulating a backup plan, the only affordable alternative seemed to be a flood plain caravan on the outskirts of a heavy industrial town in decline. I settled on Scunthorpe which was precisely what I deserved. A quick web-trawl confirmed my worst fears: I was never going to convince anyone that a yacht was a floating caravan. Even worse was the discovery that number five in Trip Advi...
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Left to My Own Devizes (Saturday 05/05/2018)

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The omens were good. The cycle path from Bristol to Reading was open and Harts Bakery was overflowing with high calorie cycle fodder. The bikes gleamed in the benevolent bank holiday sunshine and National Cycle Route 4 (NCR4) beckoned. Everyone came who said they would, barring a few el eventh hour excuses. No o ne was crushed by a falling piano or succumbed to recurrent plumbago but a couple, quite honestly, declined in favour of better offers. A bad excuse is always better than a simple no show and i n the end there were four of us. My brother John came from Ross, Mika from Reading; Paul and I made it to the start line from the next post code. And then, when all seemed to be going so smoothly, fate shoved an unwelcome stick into our collective spokes. The splintering crunch was punctual departure face-planting onto the tarmac of best laid plans. Distracted by the breakfast of champions, John developed a flat tyre somewhere between tucking in...
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