ENVOY'S 2017 CRUISING PLANS

Envoy is in Lefkas Marina for the northern hemisphere winter while we're home for the New Zealand summer, returning in just a few days.

We have exciting plans for this year's cruising!
After a brief shakedown cruise to ensure Envoy is performing well in the vicinity of our Lefkas home base, around mid-May we'll head north to Corfu and then north-east to Albania. From there we head west across to the north-east coast of Italy and south down the Italian Boot to Sicily, where we'll spend the bulk of our time, with two side trips to Malta , a destination we haven't visited before about 50 miles offshore from Sicily. We'll also visit the Aeolian Islands off north-east Sicily and while leaving Envoy in a marina take the hydrofoil to Stromboli Island.

Then around early September we'll start a leisurely northwards cruise back to the northern Ionian area to go into Lefkas Marina second week of October. Yes we're having a slightly shorter cruising season this year, being away for only a bit over six months rather than the usual seven plus.

When we get back to Envoy we'll have been absent for nearly seven months so there'll be quite a bit to do, although hopefully Sailand and other contractors will have completed most of the 25 or so maintenance issues we asked them to tackle during winter ranging through replacing zips on vinyl covers, repairing a sea water leak on our smaller RHIB, checking the windlass motor and several preventative maintenance jobs on each of our three engines.

It's always fun getting Envoy cruise-ready as we see her come back to life around us and are enthusiastic about getting cruising, but it's quite a logistical exercise involving not only Diane and I but contractors involved in marine engineering, electrical, upholstery, RHIB repair, outboard maintenance, hull polishing and anti fouling, Naiad stabilisers (to replace the seals on the fins) and HRO water maker (to repair a leak).
Envoy will be pulled out of the water before we return so that some of the out-of-water jobs can be started, particularly anti-fouling and hull polishing.

Over many cruising years we've met a huge number of owners and some rely almost completely on contractors, doing virtually nothing themselves. At the other extreme some owners do nearly everything themselves, and I say nearly because it would be virtually impossible for any owner to have the skills and specialist knowledge to tackle everything. We're probably about in the middle of the range, doing as much as we can ourselves but relying on contractors for technically demanding work like reconditioning alternators, rebuilding water pumps etc as well as physically demanding work like anti-fouling. Apart from these factors, without help from contractors it would probably take us about an additional three or four weeks to get cruising.

We'll update progress after our arrival.