Some people have asked us about our route so we’ve included it in the image with this blog. When we first set out we made a plan to move from Barcelona to Turkey within 3 months because of visa restraints, we normally make a general plan and then we work on specific places to visit a week or 10 days ahead, but many times the circumstances change especially when it comes to weather and technical issues, hence we end up alternating our plans.
The main app we used for planning the trip from the days we were in Dubai is Navionic Boating app (http://www.navionics.com). The most useful resource to locate a bay or marina to stay in is Navily (http://www.navily.com ), this app shows you where you are allowed to anchor, what winds you are protected from in the bays in real time, where marinas are located and the most useful part is the remarks from sailors who’ve been there so you get genuine advise if a place is suitable to stay in or not. We also have the pilot books for the Mediterranean, they are useful too but very big (600+ pages), heavy books so not convenient to have them all on the boat. Each book is for a certain area so we have the ones for the Balearic Islands, France & Corsica, Italy, Greece and Turkey.
We also used almost every weather app there is out there. Weather is a science by itself, it is probably the most complex factor to deal with while at sea. The main weather apps we used (all of them were paid services): Predictwind (http://www.predictwind.com ), this was our main goto app. We trusted the ECMWF model which was specifically for Europe, the other models including Predictwind’s own PWE (also for Europe) was not that accurate. The other app we used was WINDY. We have the paid version as well and we mainly used this app to compare the weather model with what Predictwind was showing. We also used Meteo, Windguru and a number of other apps.
For more info, pls message us and we will be more than happy to answer any questions you have.
We would like to thank some particular friends whom we consulted with the whole time while we were out there. (not in any particular order)
Adeeb Sawaya: Adeeb has sailed around the world on his Bavaria 49 almost single handed! Poor Adeeb had to put up with my questions right into the night! We thank you!
Rod Magee: Rod is an Emirates A380 pilot! He owns the exact same model Lagoon 450s that we have. We saw his boat in Dubai with our dealer, he probably was the main reason we picked this model. Rod has an abundance of knowledge about the Lagoon Cats. He taught me how to service the engines, saildrives and explained to me all the systems on the boat. He was also there for us answering loads of questions we had. Thank you Rod!
Dave Dodson: Dave also owns a Lagoon 450s. Dave has sailed the Med and crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean during his first season. Him and his wife Haley have a Youtube channel called The Daley Adventure (https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDaleyAdventure/) Their channel is amazing, fun, entertaining and educational (they teach you how to have fun :D)… Thank you Dodsons!
Amr Tamraz, Adel Lootah, Khaled Al Kamda, Hussam Dajjani: thank you all so much… The Dubai Sailors whatsapp group was so helpful. Between Amr and Adel’s Knowledge about Turkey and Greece, I am so grateful for your help!
My dealer Tan Services (http://tanorient.com/) They were also there for us during the whole trip. Patricia was extremely helpful and was there for us during the day, night and on weekends! Thank you all!
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