In Search of Falcons and White Fluffy Dogs

Apparently, you can still put in long days and come home exhausted even without gainful employment.  Such has been the lives of the Burnetts lately, so please forgive the slight goofiness of this post.  Mel is a bit punch-drunk.

She was just interrupted.  Tommy is trying to put a textbox into his Word report on the Arab influence on the history and culture of Malta.  Textboxing in Word has broken the best of us.

Okay, crisis averted.  Poseidon will have to wait for another day to harvest those sweet, salty textboxing tears.

This week, the Burnetts wrapped up Crete with an overnight stay inland at Milia Mountain Retreat.  We built a fire, ate great food, and worked on building airplane models.  We returned quite relaxed to our boat, only to find that Marvin had mysteriously developed a crack in the interior fiberglass on the ceiling by the owner’s berth.  So there was another day working on the boat, with Greg staining one of his good pairs of shorts by building some kind of fiberglass tornado inside a tarp and eventually deeming his patch, “strong but ugly.”  Snide joke omitted.

The patch held during an easy three-day offshore to Malta.  This included some beam reaching in 14 kts of wind on just 2 foot high, following seas!  Oh, Med, you so crazy!  It also included courtesy flag construction, yoga, homeschooling, and brownie making.  In fact, the boat was such a happy little paradise on the passage that one dark night about 50 winged beasts, inspired by the sight of Tommy and Greg in the aft cockpit hunting a swarm of flying insects, decided to roost on Marvin, throw a bird or bat party, and crap all over the boat.  Well, Mel hopes it was about 50 birds.  Either that or just a few birds ate some really, really bad dragonfly souvlaki.

The most popular port in Malta, Valletta, was booked out because of a recent sailing race.  With strong winds coming, we are currently berthed at the Mgarr Marina in Gozo.  “Gozo: Second Best Island in Malta.”  From here we can take a quick ferry to the island of Malta.  We can also indulge in watching horses swim in the ocean, gossiping about grumpy owners in white bathrobes scowling at their yacht crew while docking, and futilely guessing how to pronounce anything written in Maltese.  At this moment we have now completed two tourist days here, and so Mel will let the pics show you the rest.