Coming to Tunisia we had to - as usual - effect a number of urgent repairs. The most serious of which was re-replacing one of the wires of the rigging that we replaced in Malta.
The new one (which in reality was a pretty old one that had been kicking around in the bottom of the boat for a while.) Didn't even last the trip over from Malta and had split in two or three places. Egil was dispatched up the mast to put the old one back. Now we're hoping everything will hold up until we reach home. ...which is getting pretty near now. Unbelievable! We have been sailing for more than a year now. The stars look familiar, we're on the right hemisphere, our clocks are set to the right timezone, the weather is cold and we've stopped provisioning "as much as possible" whenever we find something cheap. In maybe as little as a month we can be in Norway, and by the beginning of August back home by the border to Russia.
Whoa, whoa! That doesn't have anything to do with Tunisia, does it? I digress!
Finished with our repairs we got drunk, visited the most dodgy pub since Ivalo-Hotelli and Sevettin Baari combined, and despatched the TV-celebrity Erlend back to Norway as all the attention and groupies he kept drawing got too much for us, modest, quiet and shy as we are.
Then it was time for some sightseeing. Because of the weather we couldn't move anyway, so we bussed over to Tunis and Carthage/Karthago to check out the city. Egil also needed some new shoes to replace his old ones, bought in Egypt. These had disappeared mysteriously, possibly due to extreme ugliness. After having haggled the price down to less than a quarter of the starting price the salesman found it essential to call Egil "Ali Baba" as he handed him his change. Egil thought it necessary to reply by "No, YOU're Ali Baba!" Those who are in the know, know....
In Carthage we checked out some really old bricks. Apparantly made by some rumanians, bad job it seems anyway, since it's all falling apart. After seeing all this and having mangled and abused the french language as much as our rusty high-school french allowed us, we returned to the boat.
Back in Bizerte, oh, yes, that's were we kept the boat, we had to wait a couple of more days for the weather to be tolerable. While we were gone a storm had passed and filled the boat with gravel, sand and dust that didn't go away until yesterday when a weatherfront passed us with crazy winds in the face and water all over the boat. Now it's back to no-wind again, and it seems like we'll stop over a day in Algeria. The Med sucks for sailing.
We´ve spent the time doing intensive repairwork and have managed to get made and replace two new wires in the rig, make our lights in the mast work again (we were receiving complaints from the commercial traffic on our VHF that we cannot respond with when we were running around at night with no lights, wonder why...), changed oil, filled diesel and not succeded in repairing our VHFs. All in a two days and squeezed in between socializing with the other cruisers in the anchorage. 
And now, in a couple of hours we´ll be "home" in the Atlantic!!!!! Finally, it´s been almost two years since we saw it the last time!
Or beating up against the wind
Someone told us that Algeria was a sweet spot to hang out, the trick was apparantly to get yourself arrested in the right place. Sidi Ferruch was such a place, and since we were going close by anyhow, we decided to give it a go. Unfortunately they just gave us plenty of polite hassle, told us the harbour was to shallow to enter and sent us packing after 20 minutes. A brief, brief visit to Algeria....
I just checked my nag-list, and it appears I forgot to nag about currents. Appearantly the currents are all against us. We spent 60 hours covering 100 miles out from Sidi Ferruch. 100 miles is normally an ok 24 hrs run... 
Tripping with Erlend, the Animal Friend.
The pictures from Malta to Tunisia by way of an unscheduled stopover in Italy.
On the way we finally managed to rip the old jib to shreds and show off some dolphins. Always great fun for the kids, the dolphins. 
In Malta we discovered two things; first of all Egil's cousin Ole were arriving with a crew from his work, not to join us, but to do what Norwegians normally do abroad. We promptly joined. 
Secondly and far less important, we discovered that two of the wires in our rigging had taken such a beating going to Crete that they were coming apart and had to be replaced. That done we returned to the bars, basking in our norwegianness. 
Now we're nursing a four-day hangover, waiting for Erlend, the dyrevenn, so we can leave this place and go to Tunisia. (Unless we change our minds enroute and go somewhere else.)
For us the Canal brought some change in crew; not only did we have on board the essential pilot who showed us which way to pass through the canal (doh...), we had also expeditioned over to Cario to pick up Alex. 
A couple of days spent in Cairo, the guys together for the first time in a couple of years.
So entering the Mediterranean and celebrating with water mixed about 60/40 into a drink called "Vodka", served in a convenient shot-glass, we discovered that in the Med most winds are generated by-, and therefore blowing directly from Crete. Alex got himself a rude awakening as to what blue ocean cruising can be all about, hammering up against the wind blowing a constant 15 to 20 knots from right where you wanna go, but being a good sport he later claimed to have had fun. (Reportedly apart from the first couple of days spent in utter misery and seasickness.)
Quite a bit of clothes really. Things have just got colder since the Maldives, but this is outrageous. Øyvind have actually been force to use pants for the first time in 15 months, and has had to abandon his idea of making it home all the way in shorts. 
To cut the story short, we made it to Crete three days before the Larsen-family's easter holiday where up, but not before Crete had generated a final full gale to be served in our faces on the final approach. Using about every trick in our little book we just made it into harbour, not the marina we intended to go into, but a wharf smack in the middle of town. There Egil's family met up with a crew carrying their best "what? weather? storm? where?"-look. 
