What a year 2020 has turned out to be the paperwork for Galerne didn’t seem that much or that hard to get through to begin with and Thiery was a good as gold explaining the French side of the process which included the deregistration of the boat from France and the changeover of ownership by the French Authorities and so I started filling in pages and pages of paperwork only to find that France like most of the rest of the world suddenly closed down because of Covic19! Not only this but it would appear that Cyprus also stopped sending mail to any outside country and so my first set of papers had a bit of a hiccup and then arrived just after the second set which were sent after the mail restrictions had opened up. The plot then thickened because the government officials that needed to deal with my paperwork weren’t at work but the owners tranfer papers where stamped on the 9^th June 2020 as was the proof of deregistration and more important when you live in Cyprus the proof that EU VAT has been paid.

So we have the paperwork done and a boat that I now own in a country I can’t get to because all flights are still Covidised and not flying, deep joy. Not that anyone really cares but also the weather window that would have pushed us all the way home to Cyprus tends to start to stop around August and even push back as more time pushes by but still no flights!

Finally, we got a break and the two of us booked flights through Athens into Marseille and hoped that the flight restrictions didn’t change before the trip. Covid19 tests with Negative results just before the flight was a good sign and then all the paperwork for Greece and France got us to the planes and away.

Because of Covid19 and because I just wanted to we had planned to travel the 1500 nautical miles without stopping just in case we found ourselves quarantined or worse unable to leave somewhere as that could have been disastrous for everyone.

We’ve made it to France without too much hassle now we have work to be done and to get going before people start closing borders again…