January 2023  MAYA

By Justyn Lane

Maya has, like many a boat, a long and interesting history.

She is a MetAmiet Embrun 40, built by Tony Adams, who went to night school to learn to weld to build her. The initial 6 years was spent cruising and living aboard in the Baltic, p.24 of the January 2005 Yachting Monthly magazine has a fascinating article written about life aboard in the cold, including a photo of her frozen in harbour.

Once in the Med, they cruised her extensively including Tunisia, where they had the marinised Peugeot engine fully overhauled. In the end landing in Greece until they felt they were too old to continue to liveaboard and so in 2016 they sold her to a man who had a dream of sailing her round the world, the sad story of which is how we came to own her.

When we found her on eBay, effectively a project boat stranded in a yard on Spain with almost no interior but a good solid job done of the most expensive and time-consuming part, the hull. We bought her sight unseen. Due to Covid restrictions it was nearly 2 months before I could get from Italy to Spain to see her, then commenced nearly 4 months of living in a camper van at the boat yard and making her seaworthy and habitable… she has all new seacocks, plumbing, wiring, batteries, water and fuel tanks plus much more.

In July 2021, she was close to ready so I sailed/motor-sailed her across to Italy in a single passage, which has been where we have enjoyed her, sailing in the Golf of Poets and Cinqueterre. We completed the rest of the “aesthetic” interior work so she has been home for us for a couple of months while we cruise her around Corsica back to France.

Our current adventure has taken us from La Spezia past Livorno down to Elba, where we stayed for a few days with the weather preventing a change in anchorage, which was fine as we luckily found nearly the perfect anchorage to start. We then motor-sailed (as most of the trip has been) down to Porto Vecchio on the East coast, where we ended up hanging on the hook for a day and a half in solid 35 gusting +40 knot winds, but being a good solid boat she just took it in her stride. We then got a bit of a break in the weather to get down toward the Bouche de Bonifacio and Bonifacio town, which was a very different experience!

We have worked our way up the West Coast, hiding from the Mistral when it struck and motor-sailing in the flat calm in between… when we have had wind at less than 25th, it’s almost exclusively been from the direction we are heading, but that is the Med. We are currently in Calvi, waiting for another Mistral to blow through before doing the 22-24 hour crossing to mainland France, aiming for somewhere between Cannes and Toulon before heading to our final destination at Port St Louis de Rhône where we will make our way back to Italy with Maya safely on the hard and see what the future holds…

Our original plan was to sail her back around to Northern Europe to explore, but a change in circumstances has meant we are relocating to Australia for work, so in her almost complete state we sadly will have to put Maya on the market.

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