Bali 4.2 catamaran delivered from Tunis to Corfu

The client was a Greek company that had bought a new Bali 4.2 in France, and the boat was built in Tunisia. We worked with their manager, a Hungarian. The crew arrived in Tunis on the agreed date, flying via Paris. Summer flights to Tunis are expensive, and a cheaper way is a flight to Palermo and the ferry across. Then we waited. The yard was running late, and with three countries and three companies involved every question took days to answer. We spent a week in a hotel. In the end the yard released the catamaran without her toilets, and we sailed on the last day before a long public holiday. Waiting for the toilets would have cost at least another week. Before we cast off, the yacht was checked system by system with the yard's technicians and the port formalities were done with the port authority.

The orange dots on the map are the track from our SPOT satellite tracker, the little device we call the egg. It sends the boat's position every few hours, so the owner could follow the catamaran from Tunis past Sicily to the Ionian on his phone.

The passage itself was fast and quiet: low winds and a direct track with Sicily and Malta on the horizon. In Malta we made an unplanned stop and the manager flew in to join the crew for the last leg to Corfu. The client needed the boat fast because she was already booked for charter. We reached Corfu a week before the first guests, the toilets went in that week, and the charter started on schedule. Two lessons we pass on to every owner collecting a new boat abroad: expect the builder's after-sales support to be slower than the sea, and let the delivery crew do the pre-departure check with the yard's people present. Since this job our contracts also say clearly what a waiting day costs: a day rate for a qualified crew plus a daily allowance.

The yacht

The Bali 4.2 (Xavier Faÿ for Bali Catamarans) is built around open living space: a tilting garage-style door that joins cockpit and saloon and a deck area around 10% larger than its competitors. A comfortable boat to deliver and an easy one to hand over.