23rd August 2012

Location: Northney Marina

Destination: Le Havre

Travel Distance: Approx 80 nm

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After a rushed departure from Turners Hill, we arrived at Northney Marina, Mojo’s home port at 4pm. Shaun quickly prepared Mojo for her journey to La Spezia by letting the tubes right down and tightly wrapping her in a cargo net – not only is Mojo too wide to drive legally on the roads with her tubes filled, it makes it much easier to travel long distances. At 8pm, we were ready to head to the ferry port.

Once at the ferry port we sat and waited for embarkation to begin slightly nervous of the journey down to Italy – had we mis calculated the timings? Could we actually get Mojo there safely?

Boarding began and luckily we were not stopped by customs even though they were stopping all vans and 4×4’s- maybe they realised that our 15m rig would not fit into one of their sheds?

Finally, at 23:00 we set sail for Le Havre with a drink on deck as we headed passed our usual haunts – Gunwhwrf Quays, Priory Bay and the Forts with a touch of trepidation- we had the idea of trailing the boat to Italy because she is an Italian rib who is already quite well travelled having been brought over from Portugal when we bought her.  Last Christmas we bought the Italian Ports pilot book and we discussed the possibilities of taking Mojo overseas. The Internet did not provide much information and a lot of research went into finding accommodation, a mooring for Mojo and a place to launch her. surprisingly there are not many places to be able to do this, and when they are available, they are extremely expensive – beyond our budget!  Luckily we found a campsite that had a mooring and a crane to put the boat in the water! We immediately booked up – we were now taking our boat to  The Ligurian Sea, Italy.

The cheapest way to get Mojo and Shaun’s van over to France was via the ferry- so this was booked at Easter. A restless night was spent in our cabin as we approached our long road trip through France.