Malta

After the brief problem with the gears, our journey from Portopalo was fairly uneventful. We set off early with a light, force 3, northeasterly and had a calm sail south towards Malta, watching the sun rise up from the sea and avoiding the many fishing boats on the way. This leisurely sail lasted all morning until the wind shifted to the south, coming from directly in front of us, so we motored the last couple of hours.

We entered into the entrance of Sliema Creek, with views of Valetta on our port side.

It was very hot and sunny when we arrived in Sliema bay and moored on one of the private buoys, that are kindly made available by the owners when they are not needed. Here, there were views of the familiar high rise apartment blocks and huge cranes (of which I counted at least 15) lining the waterfront. We recognised many of the boats already there as friends that we had met previously on our travels.

We only stayed for one week and it turned out to be a very sociable time catching up with friends. During our stay, Valletta were hosting the annual Notte Bianca festival, one of Malta’s biggest annual arts and culture festivals, so a group of us decided to get the ferry across to visit.

As we walked through the very busy city there were many performances along the decorated streets and piazzas, including music, theatre, dance, comedy plus other roaming acts and parades.

Churches, palaces and museums were also opened to host live performances and concerts. The main objective of this one night festival is to portray and support the local artists.

The event holds approximately 50 projects spread across every corner of Valletta. With plenty to see, we had to plan our route and followed the ‘music route’ which took us to various genres of music such as jazz, blues, country, Maltese classics and rock and pop.

We headed up to Barracka gardens, the highest point of Valletta’s fortifications, where a big stage was set up. A band was just starting to play on the terrace surrounded by the atmospheric limestone arches, with panoramic views over Grand Harbour.

We stayed and listened, the band was very good, particularly the girl singing who had a great voice. They played a variety of well known rock and pop tunes, and the singer had no problems belting out anthems from Tina Turner, Adele and Miley Cyrus among others.

A lot of work had gone into organising the event, setting up the many different stages and arranging the acts, it’s a shame that it only lasted one night.

After a week in Malta, we needed to return to the UK. We booked flights to leave the following day and managed to book ZigZag into the nearby Manole Island Yacht Yard where she would be lifted out of the water. We had a busy day getting her ready, removing sails etc and prepared to motor the short distance to the lifting bay. We slipped the lines from the mooring buoys, and forward gear did not engage immediately worrying the owners of our neighbouring boat (and us) a little as we were drifting towards them, luckily the gear clicked in after probably only a few seconds but seemed longer. We reversed slowly into the lifting bay, the only way to stop reversing is to go into forward gear but it failed again so we crashed into the dock. Fortunately, the dock was well fendered so it didn’t do any damage other than give the marinaras (and us) a shock and bent our swim ladder a little. Ziggy was lifted out and after a very powerful jet wash, she looked ready for the winter.

Now we realised that the gear box definitely needed repair and had fears that it could involve a new engine and sail drive (gearbox/propellor) as some new parts were not always compatible with our older engine. We asked the yard to arrange an engineer to look at it while we were away. Malta is a good place to get any boat work done so we left Ziggy, hopefully in capable hands, and returned to the UK for the winter.

It was difficult arranging work whilst in the UK but two months later we received a quote to repair the gear box and a date in January for this to be done. We returned to Malta for a few days to supervise the work, it was nice to have some winter sunshine.

It all seemed to go well and the engineer was confident that the installation of a new clutch had solved the problem, but we wouldn’t know for sure until we launched at the end of the winter. The engine all looked good to me!