So, we've spent one (half) night sailing without the engine running, the rest has been spent motoring in dead calms
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....
Unfortunately the polite Algerians sent us packing straight into an approaching weatherfront that had us fighting for the best part of one day. Our windmeter maxed out on 60 knots, but it's broken. However we know it shows approximately twice as much as it actually blows, so it was blowing somewhere over 30 knots for the whole day. Interesting sensation when the front passed, tried to drown us in rain and then started blowing 30 knots from the opposite direction. One hour later the (big-big-big) waves started coming from not one but all directions, and 20 minutes after that it just stopped blowing, leaving us bobbing uselessly and helplessly around in swells from aaaaaaaaaaalllll directions. Ahhh, the joy...
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... All in all we've been moving agonizingly slow. Howevever we hoped to reach Gibraltar by the beginning of the next big blow. We're 100 miles away now, and according to the forecast we should be able to make it. Just. Unfortunately the in-the-face-winds started blowing hard again this morning. We quickly decided for the first time actually double back and then zoomed downwind for about ten miles and ended up here: Adra, on Costa del Sol. Now, maybe we will have time to do some crucial repairs, god knows its needed. Actually we could make a whole blogpost about everything that's broken on board. We just want to patch everything up good enough to make it home. ...preferably in one - or at least not too many - piece(s).
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.
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.
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. 
