Malta almost never appears on charter shortlists. People fly in for a week in a hotel, look at Valletta, swim in the Blue Lagoon and go home — and they treat a yacht as something you do in Croatia or Greece. In fact Malta sits at the exact centre of the most interesting stretch of the Mediterranean: sixty miles north lies Sicily, two hundred south is Africa, and the water here has a clarity the Adriatic simply doesn't have, because no river runs into it. This time the boat was M/Y TRILOGY — a 2025 Ferretti 780, twenty-four metres: eight guests in four cabins, four professional crew, gyroscopic stabilisers and a beach club at water level, meaning the aft platform folds down so you step out of the saloon and straight into the sea. This is a yacht built to cover longer passages in comfort, and that is precisely why I chose a route I would not propose on a smaller boat.
Day 1 — Grand Harbour and the first evening under the bastions
Embarkation in Grand Harbour → the Three Cities → quayside at Birgu
We boarded in the late afternoon, in a harbour that has no equal anywhere else in this series. Grand Harbour is a natural inlet cut into rock and walled on both sides by sixteenth-century stone bastions — fortifications the Knights built after the Great Siege so that it could never happen again. The yacht lies stern-to the quay and a hundred metres of vertical limestone with gun embrasures stands above her. My first evening always looks the same: the aft deck, an Aperol Spritz, and watching the port light up — except that here what lights up is not street lamps but the floodlit walls of Valletta opposite and three old cities on our side: Birgu, Senglea, Cospicua. Before dinner we walked the narrow lanes of Birgu, where the ground floors are ordinary flats and the doorways carry stone coats of arms four hundred years old. The chef served dinner on deck: fresh dorado from the market at Marsaxlokk, straight off the grill, with lemon and the capers that grow here out of cracks in the walls.
Day 2 — The Blue Lagoon, before the ferries come
Grand Harbour → St Paul's → Comino, Blue Lagoon → Gozo, Mġarr
I got up at first light and did what I do on every charter: coffee and the flybridge. Grand Harbour at five in the morning is like the surface of a lake, the bastions stand in pink light and nothing moves except a single tug somewhere near the yard. That is the boundless calm you cannot buy ashore at any price. We left right after breakfast, rounded the island from the north, and by nine we were anchored in the Blue Lagoon between Comino and Cominotto. Here is the whole trick, and it is worth knowing: the lagoon has a pale sand bottom that turns the water an indecent turquoise — but from ten in the morning four excursion ferries park there with several hundred people. Arrive by yacht at eight and you have it almost to yourself for two hours. That is exactly the difference you pay a charter fee for. We swam until it got crowded, then ran four miles across to Gozo and into Mġarr, a small harbour on a hillside crowned by a neo-Gothic church visible from the whole channel. The afternoon went by at anchor in a nameless cove on the western side: no toys, no jet skis, just lying and swimming in warm, azure water.
Day 3 — Gozo from the side you can't see from land
Mġarr → Dwejra → Wied il-Għasri → Ramla l-Ħamra → Victoria
On the third day we went right around Gozo — some forty kilometres of coast, most of it a vertical wall. We started at Dwejra in the west: the Azure Window once stood here, the stone arch that collapsed into the sea in 2017, but what lay beneath it remains — the Inland Sea, a small salt lagoon joined to the open water by a tunnel bored through the cliff. You go through that tunnel in a small boat, tens of metres in darkness, and come out directly beneath a hundred-metre wall. Further north is Wied il-Għasri: a cleft a dozen metres wide cut several hundred metres into the cliff, with a pebble beach at the very end. We took the tender in and moved through it in complete silence, because in a place like that nobody talks. In the afternoon we lay off Ramla l-Ħamra, the island's one large beach, its sand the colour of brick from crushed limestone with iron in it. In the evening we drove up to Victoria and the Citadel: a walled town on the hilltop at the centre of the island, from which you can see the whole of Gozo at once, sea to sea.
From my experience as a broker, here is what you need to settle before signing, not during. This is a charter that starts in one country and crosses into another mid-week, and such a trip carries different paperwork from a week spent in a single jurisdiction. First: where the charter begins determines where and on what basis the tax on the service is accounted for, and the Maltese and Italian regimes are not the same thing; with the identical yacht in the identical week the final invoice can differ depending on where you start. Second: a commercial vessel moving between countries reports her departure and arrival — that is not an obstacle, but it is captain's time and it is a line in the APA. Third, quite prosaically: fuel costs differently in Malta and in Italy, and a Ferretti 780 drinks her share on a sixty-mile crossing. The order in which you build this route therefore has financial consequences — and that is exactly the moment when it pays to have someone run the numbers on paper before you sign anything.
Day 4 — Sixty miles of open sea
Gozo → Malta Channel → Portopalo di Capo Passero → Marzamemi
The fourth day was the crossing. From Gozo to the southern tip of Sicily is roughly sixty miles of pure open water — no islands, no shelter, with the swell running in from the west. On a yacht that holds a comfortable twenty-something knots that is three hours; on a smaller boat without stabilisers it can be an entire day with half the party green in the face. We left just after dawn on a forecast the captain had been watching for three days, and for the first hour Malta sank astern until it disappeared altogether. After that there was only colour — and this is the thing you cannot describe to anyone who has not seen it: the water in the Malta Channel is ink-blue, because there are several hundred metres under the keel and not a gram of river silt in it. Around eleven the flat line of Capo Passero came out of the haze with its little island and fort, and shortly afterwards we were lying in Portopalo. For the night we moved three miles on to Marzamemi — an old tuna village where the disused tonnara and a small church stand around a single stone square that runs straight down into the sea. Dinner: tuna that had been in the water that morning, and a local nero d'Avola.
Sixty miles of open sea is not a distance. It is a decision you make three days earlier, looking at the forecast.
— Tomasz Wrzesiński, yacht broker, Monaco
Day 5 — Ortygia at sunset
Marzamemi → Vendicari reserve → Plemmirio → Syracuse, Ortygia
On the fifth day we ran north along the shore, past Vendicari — a reserve whose salt pans hold flamingos in August — and on under Plemmirio, a headland of underwater caves and water so clear you can see the anchor lying on the bottom in fifteen metres from the deck. We spent half the day in it. Then in the afternoon we entered the Great Harbour of Syracuse, and that was the moment I have called, in every previous instalment, the great magic of the week. Ortygia is an island the size of a few city blocks, joined to the mainland by two short bridges, and the whole of it is one town: a sixth-century-BC temple of Apollo lying open at the roadside, a baroque cathedral square paved in pale stone that turns honey-coloured at sunset, and a cathedral built inside the Greek temple of Athena — twenty-four Doric columns two and a half thousand years old still stand in its walls and you can put your hand on them. We walked down to the Fonte Aretusa, a freshwater spring rising ten metres from the sea with papyrus growing in it, and ate ice cream sitting on the wall above the water, watching the yachts lying stern-to along the quay. That ritual is a permanent fixture of this series and I have no intention of changing it.
Day 6 — Back south, without hurrying
Syracuse → Isola delle Correnti → Portopalo
On the sixth day we came back down south, this time genuinely slowly, with two swim stops on the way. The southernmost point of Sicily is Isola delle Correnti — a small flat island joined to the land by a sand spit, at the place where two seas meet: the Ionian from the east and the Mediterranean from the west. You can see it on the water with the naked eye, because the swell runs differently on each side of the spit and the colours do not match. We stayed there until evening. The crew opened the beach club on the transom and several hours went on what people do most willingly on these trips: lying in the water and coming out only to eat something. For the night we returned to Portopalo and had dinner on deck at anchor, watching the lighthouse and the lights of the fishing boats heading out.
Day 7 — In between the bastions
Portopalo → Malta Channel → Grand Harbour, Valletta
The last morning was like the six before it: coffee on the flybridge, a sea like glass, the land still in shadow. We left early to take the whole crossing on smooth water, and for three hours absolutely nothing happened on deck — sun loungers, books, somebody asleep. Halfway across a pair of dolphins ran with us for a while astern, but nobody even got up for a phone. And then, off the starboard bow, Malta began to grow out of the flat horizon — first a line, then a shore, until at last the entrance to Grand Harbour opened and we came in between the bastions in full afternoon light, Fort St Elmo to port and Fort St Angelo to starboard. At that hour the stone is the colour of honey. I stepped off TRILOGY tanned and suspiciously quiet, with one thought: that this week had sixty miles of empty sea in the middle of it, and that those miles were the best part of it.
What it costs and what you should know
M/Y TRILOGY — a Ferretti 780, built 2025, twenty-four metres, eight guests in four cabins (three double plus one convertible), four professional crew, gyroscopic stabilisers, a beach club at water level, a Williams SportJet 395 tender, Seabob, SUP paddleboard, inflatable mattress and full snorkelling kit — charters from €55,000 per week for the 2026 season, with a range up to €65,000 depending on dates. On top of that comes APA of roughly thirty per cent of the rate, about €16,500 at the lower figure — that is not a fee but an advance against fuel, provisioning, marinas and port dues, of which you get an itemised account to the euro at the end of the week, with any surplus returned. Tax and port fees are counted separately. She cruises year-round in the central Mediterranean — Italian Riviera, Amalfi Coast, Sicily and Malta — so this route can equally be built in reverse, starting from Sicily.
The thing you will not find in the brochure: the route in this logbook comes to some two hundred and thirty miles in a week, of which a hundred and twenty are the two crossings of the Malta Channel. Which means the choice of yacht matters more here than anywhere else in this series. In the Adriatic or the Saronic Gulf your legs are two hours long and almost any boat will do. Here you have sixty miles without shelter, so three things count: stabilisers that work underway and not only at anchor, range on one tank, and a captain who knows this channel and knows how the sea behaves when the wind backs west. This is not theory — in July and August there are weeks when the weather window for the crossing comes once, and you either take it or the route changes. On top of that there is something few people think about with Malta: the island is almost entirely ringed by cliff, sheltered anchorages are few, and most of them only work in one wind direction. The same route in the wrong order is the same yacht and an entirely different holiday. With a specific boat in a specific week, I am the one who checks the paperwork, the tax, the range and the forecast, and I am the one who sets the order of the stops. You have the map; a guide is still worth having.
Want to actually sail this route? TRILOGY cruises Malta, Sicily and the whole of the central Mediterranean, all year round. Tell me when you are going and who with — I will check availability, check the vessel's paperwork, and build the week around you. See this charter →
This is the fourteenth instalment of the Charter Logbook series — after the French Riviera, the Balearics, the Cyclades, Dalmatia, Sardinia, the Amalfi Coast, Corsica, Sicily and the Aeolian Islands, the Saronic Gulf, the Tuscan Archipelago, the Italian Riviera, the Ionian Islands and the Kornati with the river Krka. Tomasz Wrzesiński, W Yachts Monaco.