It’s been a few days since my last post and although the day after arriving in Tunisia was a wipe out due to tiredness I have no excuse for not getting on with this sooner as we have done very little all week! Until yesterday! More on that later! And in advance sorry for lack of photos – you will understand why!

The crossing from Sardinia to Tunisia was a mixture of 18 hours of great joy, great fear and a lot of biscuit and chocolate eating!

The only other time I have been involved in a night crossing was from Corsica to Elba. This was 12 hours and the ‘watch’ was literally that – watching with the naked eye in the pitch dark trying to work out if the lights that could be seen meant a boat coming towards, away or across us! Also, if we were seeing a another small sailing boat or a huge oil tanker!! Scary stuff!

This time we had the wonder of Radar which picks up anything that moves, also AIS which identifies other boats in the vicinity, as long as they have the AIS system as well.

Late afternoon, just before sunset, we were sailing beautifully and then on the horizon heading from east to west we spotted an ENORMOUS boat that was picked up on the Radar but not on AIS. On closer inspection i.e. with the binoculars, it was obvious that it was a military air craft carrier with a destroyer ship just behind it! You can imagine that we were not able to identify the nationality, nor did I risk taking any photos!!

Sunset was beautiful and set us all thinking about the night ahead!

Jacques took first watch from 9pm to 11pm so Bernard and I just chilled, dozed, read etc. until next watch which was Bernard’s at 11pm to 1am. During this time Jacques slept and I dozed and kept half an eye on what Bernard was doing to see how the systems worked. Jacques did 1am to 3am watch, I went off to sleep but before I did I insisted that he should wake me in 2 hours as I felt confident enough to do the 3am to 5am watch. The watch rule is always, if in doubt ‘Wake Up Jacques’ but with all that technology it should be a doddle I thought! What I hadn’t considered was the closer we got to the coast of Africa, the shipping lane turns into the M25 on a Friday afternoon except with slightly greater speeds!

Radar tells you what boats are around you, how big they are, how fast they are travelling and most importantly, based on current speeds, at what time and at what distance it will be at the closest point to you. I had worried that at 3am I would not be very alert but suddenly seeing all those ships and the responsibility of tracking them kept me very awake! I would look at the screen and then jump up to look out of the window to see if I could match the info with a actual sighting!

Around 4am I was monitoring about 9 boats on the radar within a 12 mile radius, some looked as though they were on a direct course for us but nothing came closer than 3 miles until at 4.20 am this HUGE Russian tanker, 400 metres long, travelling at twice our speed seemed dead set towards us! Radar stated that in 20 minutes it would be .5 of a mile away at its closest point and that was too close for me so I had to invoke the ‘Wake Up Jacques’ rule!

It turned out that it did end up some distance away from us without us having to change course but it was a scary few minutes for me! By then, we were all awake so tea was made and biscuits and cakes were eaten!

Sunrise around 5.30am was magnificent and brought a sigh of relief to me at least!

We arrived in Bizerte at 7am local time (strangely on same time zone as UK) 8am in the timezone we had come from and the excellent harbour staff were there to help us moor up. I can’t honestly remember what we did for the next few hours – in a strange daze of eating, dozing, drinking tea!

Tunisia is known for having some ‘interesting’ arrival procedures for boats so we had engaged the services of a Yacht Agency and our agent Kais was, and continues to be, superb in his help. In our still dazed state he helped to facilitate Police and Customs (who did remind me of a couple of gangsters from a bad movie!) boarding the boat, translating where required, filling out many forms and paying the obligatory ‘fees’ i.e. backsheesh!

I had to show the Customs guy every bottle of booze we had on board (you can imagine that took a while!). They eventually left, smiling and then we had to go to the Port office and have mug shots and fingerprints taken!!

Well that was more than enough excitement for the day and it was only 11 am except we had the embers of energy to make a shopping trip to Carrefour (still a great deal of French influence in Tunisia) where we wandered around aimlessly (like I do at Xmas staring at the Mince Pies!) The realisation that is was Ramadan and no alcohol could be purchased didn’t really sink in just then!!! It certainly has now!

This has been a huge amount of words without many pictures so I’ll leave it there until next time when more of our adventures will be aired!!

One picture of my two fabulous sailors, out in Bizerte Old Port the evening following our arrival!

Lots of love from (a very dry!) Bizerte! xx