Malta: London to Valletta (Saturday 09/06/2018)

I volunteered to book our summer holiday.

How different things could have been.

After 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 however big the boat was, I knew I had missed it.

Dodging 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 Adviser’s top twenty list of things to do in Scunthorpe was a visit to the town’s Tourist Information Office, followed closely by venues offering slot machines and all you can drink for £6.00. On reflection, knowing my friends and family, things were looking up.

Having painted myself into a corner, it was time to come clean. By the time I had finished confessing to my failings and looked up tentatively from a tear-stained hanky, Clare had booked flights, transfers and yacht charter without a murmur of reproach. 

Goodbye Scunthorpe; Hello Malta!

Our long suffering friends, Jenny and Tom have patiently wrangled our twins on just about every holiday since they were born but sailing in Malta was a journey into uncharted waters. Barring a lip-trembling debut on a 12-foot catamaran in France last year, Alex and Sophie had never been on a boat less than 600 feet long.

Ignore the fact that the children can’t swim, have inherited my blister-max UV resistance and complain bitterly when forced outside their ten-degree comfort zone. Even disregarding these small concerns, seven days trapped on board a floating oven with two potentially volatile 5-year olds was a gamble that Jenny and Tom didn't have to take; but gamely they piled up the chips and went all in.

Do the maths: One snorkel, one mask, two children.

The months rolled by and the children's excitement grew with each passing day until finally we were standing at the Malta Air counter playing check-in roulette with the children's soon to expire passports. Shortly afterwards we were tracing our way down Italy's western seaboard above cloudless skies. Before long Sicily shimmered like a golden plate below us, floating in the aquamarine waters off the toe of the peninsula. Six minutes later the plane banked alarmingly and raced over waterless, dusty fields before landing at Valletta’s parochial airport midst a labyrinth of ancient dry-stone walls.

Even as an adult, the cabin door is a magical portal which closes on dank 5-degree greyness and, one gin and tonic later, opens onto retinal blistering brightness and hair dryer heat. It may not have been the 45-degree heatwave that was hovering somewhere offshore, but it was hot, dry and there were palm trees. The only missing components were ice cream and a hat misshapen by nine months in a drawer.

Donning the only pair of sunglasses that the children have yet to sabotage, I loosened my parka hood to take stock. Gesturing the children's attention toward the strange glowing ball in the sky, they cowered in my shadow like a pair of tiny terror-stricken vampires while I consulted the Lonely Planet and shifted from foot to foot on the bubbling tarmac.

If the first line of most Maltese guide books refers to the plucky inhabitants and their tenacious perseverance, the second usually applauds their pivotal role in history. There are few places in the world that make such a virtue of being invaded and Malta has endured the unwanted advances of an embarrassing number of suitors over the centuries. The in-flight magazine name checked Neolithic, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, British, Arab and North African interlopers. Each have amorously eased themselves into the archipelago’s multi-cultural melting pot before eventually being rebuffed, after which Malta was robustly seduced by the next in line.

Bags retrieved, we caught a taxi to Kalkara Marina in Valletta, trying to ignore the periodic stab of anxiety induced by chartering a yacht from 2,000 miles away. In the past we have taken delivery of some shockers; collapsing masts, dead instruments and failed steering gear always making an inconvenient appearance just as the fast-moving, undeviating mega-freighter hoves into view. Once they have your money, it requires stoical acceptance that you are likely to be setting sail in an ocean going misdescription. The only condition that tends to be water tight is that all the significant holes are above the waterline.

After coughing up fat rolls of euros for a list of eye-watering sundries, the boss of Malta Charters turned to his close-cropped Bulgarian assistant.

"Take him to Balthazar King" he said.

We weren’t in Naples, but it still had something of the Cosa Nostra about it; an impression that Clare did little to dispel when she popped her head round the office door to announce cheerfully that Tom  was feeding the fishes. Thankfully, he had Alex on his lap, bread in his hand and a crowd of excitable fish jostling in the water below the pontoon.

A quick Google reveals that, apart from being a 42-foot Bermudan Sloop, Balthazar King is also a successful French race horse but, thankfully not a gangland king pin. Despite this reassurance, the menace continued to haunt me all week: I was quietly resigned to the fact that any close quarter miscalculations would earn a late-night frog-march to the cash-machine followed by a painful tutorial on the finer points of collision damage waiver.

I needn’t have worried as the yacht was ship shape but evidently hard-worked on previous charters. Our last boat in Croatia was so new that we spent most of the week retrieving factory fitted shrink-wrapping from every drawer and cupboard. Balthazar King had taken more knocks than a front door and if you have ever taken surreptitious snaps of your hire car before departure, you can anticipate how I spent the next few minutes.

In seven days I would be begging. “One Armed Frankie…. put down the shears! That dent was already there. Look…look…I took pictures!”

The afternoon wind was strong, so leaving the marina was postponed until sun up and we used the time for pre-departure provisioning. It is an unwritten rule of the sea that no vessel can leave harbour without the requisite victuals, consisting mainly of strawberry jam, tea-bags and a large beanbag full of cheesy-puffs.

Most marinas have a shop just far enough  away to make a taxi there seem outrageously extravagant but one back excellent value as the alternative is a hideous death-march weighed down by cheap plastic bags that either split or cut off the circulation. Not here: travelling a third of the length of the island to the local supermarket, we were confronted by the legacy of British rule; not derelict ship yards and high-level corruption, but Jordan’s breakfast cereal, Hovis bread and all the other creature comforts that you willingly forgo in return for a bit of warmth.

Seduced by the promise of a family ticket for Lego Land Windsor, I bought two dozen artisanal Maltese dog sausages and a twelve pack of Iron Bru.