Hi all Sue here
Finally found time to sit down and update the blog!! We are now safely tucked up in Marina de Ragusa where life is very hectic. We spent a lovely two weeks with our friends Jean and John end of October, sightseeing around Syracuse and sampling the local chesses and wines.
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| Roman Ruins, Syracuse | Cathedral Ceiling, Syracuse |
The weather as usual wasn’t playing ball so instead of cruising around Sicily we headed across to Malta, as our friends are both sailors they are used to having a plan B and they hadn’t been to Malta before so it all worked out fine. It also gave me time to assess transport to airport etc for my journey home in November. We then returned to Ragusa in time for their flights home and managed to fit in a party or two!! Jeans favourite saying of “Tell someone who cares” is now the favourite phrase of the day.
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| Blue Lagoon, Comino, Malta | Valleta, Malta |
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| Sunrise, Early Departure from Malta | Car Rally, Ragusa |
We thought it would be hard to beat the social life we had last year in Lagos but it is even livelier here and we have enjoyed meeting loads of new friends and of course socialising. While I was home visiting family and friends Chris was very busy socialising in the Marina and when I got back he informed me that we were in charge of organising Christmas Day and New Years Eve events!! To be fair he did most of the organising and everyone had a great time. Chris missed Christmas Day though as he had the dreaded 24 hour sickness bug, we had friends James and Jana staying for Christmas and James had the bug as well Christmas Day. Jana wanted to fly the Q flag!!, it was such a shame after all his hard work but they did both make New Years Eve.
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| New Friends in Ragusa | Party Time on Nimrod |
My stay back in the UK was really good and I managed to fit in all the usual appointments as well as getting to see everyone. The best was seeing my granddaughters face when I turned up to meet her out of school on my first day home.
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| Sue meeting Grand Daughter, Courtney, from school | Os-Mole bin Laden !!! |
We have done a bit of sightseeing around Ragusa and are hoping to explore a lot more when our friends, Helen and Marcel come to visit in March. We must do Etna before we leave here but at the moment it’s covered in snow and not accessible. I am looking after a little dog called Bonaparte for two weeks so that’s keeping me fit and I am off to a Sumba class this afternoon. Then there’s a talk on health insurance at 5pm and we are off out for a meal on our friends boat Awake at 7pm, it’s all go!!
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| Ragusa d Ibla, on the Hillside | Ragusa d Ibla Park |
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| My lovely granddaughter | Four Generations |
And now for something completely different!! Blog Recipes - Lemon Posset and Shortbread
Lemon Posset
397g can condensed milk
150 ml double cream
3 large unwaxed lemons, finely grated zest and juice
Whisk condensed milk and cream together until the mixture has thickened but still has a light and fluffy texture. This should take 4 minutes approx. Add the lemon zest and juice and whip for a further few seconds only. The mixture will thicken very quickly now. Spoon the lemon cream into 6 individual ramekins or a large trifle bowl, then chill for at least an hour or overnight.
Serve with the shortbread biscuits or brandy snaps.
Traditional Shortbread
2oz (50g) cornflour
4oz (125g) self raising flour (has baking powder already added)
6oz (175g) plain flour (or use a total of 10oz, 300g plain flour with ½ teaspoon
baking powder if you don’t have self raising flour)
4oz (125g) castor sugar (finer than ordinary granulated. I have used ordinary granulated without any problem)
8 oz (225g) butter – either salted or unsalted – I prefer unsalted
Preheat oven to 180˚C, 350°F, gas mark 4. Grease a Swiss roll tray – say
13½ x 9½x¾ inches, 340x250x20mm. Can also be baked in a smaller, deeper
tray, if you like thicker pieces. Just watch temperature and timings.
Sieve all the dry ingredients together. Melt butter gently then mix with dry
ingredients till it all comes together in a soft dough.
Press into the tray with your hand, as evenly as possible – nice job this, warm
and squidgy. Prick over with a fork.
Bake 30 – 40 minutes (check at 20 minutes and rotate tray or lower heat if
browning too fast). Should be golden all over when ready.
Sprinkle with castor sugar while still warm. Mark into fingers and leave to cool in the
tray.
Enjoy!
Hi All, Chris’ turn now!!
As you can see I have finally got Sue to sit down and do some typing to let you all know what we have been doing.
We have had a very busy summer and have covered far too many miles, we were really glad to get tied up in Ragusa and to finally stop for the winter. The weather here in Sicily has not been anywhere near as nice as we enjoyed in Lagos last winter, we have had long periods of windy weather with sometimes 3 or 4 days of near 30knt winds without a rest. Fortunately the Christmas and New Year period was very nice with mainly sunny days, however it has still been much better than the recent weather back in the UK so we should be grateful. Having said that we are currently pinned inside the boat with 30 – 35knt winds, thunder, lightning and hailstorms with the forecast saying it will continue for three days.
For those of you who are interested here is a bit of a summary of our summer voyaging:
We left Lagos on the 10th April and finally tied up in Ragusa on 27th November after a couple of trips to Malta to take and collect Sue from her flights back home. That is a total of 231 days and we covered 2840 miles in that time. We did much more motoring than we would like but that is pretty typical for Med Cruising, we managed to sail for 36% of the time, motorsailed for 25% and motored for 39% out of our 550hrs at sea. We put nearly 220hrs onto each of our engines and used 1065 ltrs of diesel.
We are planning on a much quieter cruising season this coming summer with, hopefully, many fewer miles added to our log. We are heading over to the Greek Islands and are only planning to cover the Ionian Islands and adjacent mainland Greece this summer. We will cover the rest of the Greek Islands and Turkey in future years.
Nimrod has been extremely reliable during our travels in 2012 with only a few rare and minor breakdowns to deal with apart from the normal routine maintenance. We have the usual list of jobs to do over the winter but even this list is much shorter than previous years.
We are booked in here at Marina di Ragusa until the end of April and then we will set off to explore new waters and destinations, we will try and keep you all updated via the blog and as ever we really like to hear back from you all about what you are up to, we do miss all the gossip and scandal from back home and also the updates from fellow cruisers who are now in different areas.
