Since the Next Wave is sailing in the Mediterranean, Sicily has bin one of the places where we have sticked around the longest. We just finished with the Festival of live tour around Sicily and it has bin very good. We had the festival in more than 7 cities and several people came to know Jesus for the first time.
The program was very diverse with drama, dance, testimony's and music.
In Messina we hosted city officials for there city celebration, we were part of a parade where man in costume sailed with us to the commercial port and in front of TV camera's played music.
Once they entered the dock the did a theater play. After that they came back on board to sail under the sound of canon shots and fireworks back to the harbor.

Salvatore Loria the President of Marine reach Italy has bin organizing all the events. We are very thankful for all his work.
We are now at anchor in Syracuse and we are preparing for the upcoming DTS which is starting on September the 6^th. We are looking forward to the new things the Lord will bring to this new season on board the Next Wave!

Salvatore,Estela and Lehman

The last refit for the Next Wave was a success, but because of the great amount of things to do we planned an other period of refit.

The Refit period is a fun time with professionals and non professionals working on the ship to fix and maintain.We can use hands in engineering, carpeting, pluming, electric engineering and any other kind of help is very welcome. You can come alone or take a group from your church or work! Anyone is more than welcome to join!
The refit period will be in the months of January and February. The location isn't confirmed yet but it will be in the Catania(Sicily) Area. For more information e-mail to Nextwave@marinereach.com also if you know some one who might be interested.

There is so much happened the last couple of weeks on board the Next Wave, we thank God he is in control in every little thing.
The Captain got a big fever and didn't recover at all and the fever stayed for 7 days.

The captain went to the hospital and after 3 days he recovered little by little. The fever was gone and his happiness was back!During writing this the captain is back on board and he is packing his bags to go to a hotel to fully recover.He is feeling better but needs allot of rest. He will stay for two days in the hotel and than when everything is good we leave to the next port. Thank you very much for all your prayers and compassion, it brought Lehman much support.

In the main time God is blessing us with many other things too, a old local captain came to move the ship and we have a good secured birth until Lehman is back. The festival of live has bin great and people are giving there lives to Jesus by hearing the testimony's and the positive energy that the festival breaths out!
And next to that all we got a restaurant bringing us sandwiches and pizza (with fish) for breakfast every day! The Lord is taking good care of us.

Thank you.
Next Wave.

The Sicily tour has been going really well, we are now in Sciacca in the southern west coast of Sicily. Since we've been here we've seen Gods hand at work at least 9 people became Christians after Sunday's event, with people giving their lives to the Lord in local churches too. Currently we have an awesome team here from the South Pacific Islands of New Caledonia and Vanuatu. these guys bring so much freedom and life to Europe and are a huge blessing to the Next Wave. During our sail to Sciacca from Portopalo ( where we had many difficulties) our Captain developed a high fever and has been hospitalized here in Sciacca. Please join us as we continue to pray for his healing and restoration. We believe God is doing something amazing in our midst and the fruit shows this, hence the battles we are facing. Please also join us in prayer for our dinghy, which was stolen from the boat. The coast guard have recovered the rubber tube, but not the motor, which is the expensive part.

Click on the link below to read our latest Newsletter, put together by one of our ministry friends and volunteer from Sweden Karin

NextWave_update_June2010

We are now a full vessel with a Canadian DTS from Quebec and Kings Kids England with us. We are anchored in Syracuse Harbour meanwhile we have been ferrying teams to shore for evangelism during the morning. In the evening crew and teams go ashore for evangelism with the local church. During the afternoon the Sicilians siesta so we are doing maintenance on the ship, things like cleaning windows, polishing brass, painting and doing engine checks.
During the last few days we have had some sail training from Syracuse to Augusta and oriented the teams to the ‘ship lifestyle’. The two teams both bring a unique presence to the Next Wave, the DTS having a wonderful worshipful vibe and Kings Kids have come armed with scripture and pirate costumes and loads of ways to tell people about Gods love.
We are excited to tell you about what the Lord does over the next few weeks here in Sicily as we kick start the festival of life.

Writing from the s/y Next Wave with one more week of the refit schedule commencing. It has been a super busy time, with Captain, crew and friends of the ministry all chipping in to maintain and refit the vessel.

Some major work has been completed during this period including pressure washing the whole 350 sq. metres high hull and repainting it. As we were in dry dock it seemed best to do a thorough job of the underwater work and hopefully this will enable the vessel to run more smoothly and reduce fuel costs.

Dry docking the boat is an expensive process and also means the crew are without sanitation systems on board. From the picture you can see the beginning of the long decent to onshore toilets and showers.

The crew have also been working hard cleaning and painting the anchor and chains, they opened up the chain locker and cleaned it out. We will also fit an 'educator' to pump out this space in future.

All mandatory and safety equipment were recertified (Flares, EPIRBs, required medical stores, fire equipment and the new ship’s whistle/horn was fitted. During these inspections the VHF handsets developed a fault and will need replacing ASAP.

One of our more time consuming jobs was the galley extractor piping had to be rerouted to create more separation from E.R. ventilation and the filters were removed and cleaned.

Many areas of the ship have been deep cleaned, including the galley and cabins, two of which had the middle lower bunks converted so we can dismantle them and create double beds. New carpet has been ordered for the saloon which we are expecting to arrive in the next few week or so. Bulk storage space below the Sconsin has been emptied, cleaned, descaled and painted, quite a dirty smelly job!

Many routine checks have been established and carried out, we got to look at the main water tanks, the propelleor and rudder, whilst the main engine room was over hauled completed and a complete set of spares held on board ready for next overhaul. The starboard and port generators were both examined and the overboard discharge valve and sea chest for washing machine and crew shower room was removed in dry-dock to free up and re-install. Fortunately, this was the only overboard valve that was ceased.

All in all considering the small crew and volunteer team we have accomplished a lot.  However it is essential that within a year a further extensive refit period is programmed to finish postponed items from the refit and cancelled upgrades.  thank for all your support and prayers during this time.

Earlier in the year we had arranged a maintenance period and drydock in a shipyard in Messina only to discover that the yard was badly damaged in a storm in March.  Since then we have worked hard to find other suitable drydocks at a reasonable price.  Finally we can announce that we have just arrived in the Navy Base in Augusta, a town between Syracuse and Catania. As soon as we arrived, we plugged in to land power so that we can shut down our generators and engine and our engineering volunteers are working hard on their maintenance.   We have taken down the mast so that can be sanded and varnished.  
The Navy Base are treating us like royalty and it is a great honour to be here.  We have to have security passes to go in and out.  We are not allowed to take any photos from the Navy Base but the Navy ships are very impressive and nice to look at.  The crew have been ashore looking for nice Italian ice cream and local internet cafes, we are hoping though that we might be able to get cheap internet access on board in the next couple of weeks, which will be great.

We are going to be here for 2 weeks but would like to stay for up to 4 weeks so that we can do as much maintenance as possible.   On  the 9^th May we will sail to another Navy Base in Messina where we will be for 2 weeks, there we will take the Next Wave out of the water into a dry dock so that we can repaint the ship’s bottom and scrape off nearly 2 years worth of barnacles.  We will then be ready to commence our evangelism tour of Sicily starting on May 27^th.

We are very thankful for all the volunteers that have flown out to join us during this time.  If you would like to come and volunteer, it is not too late, please contact us at www.sy-nextwave.com (see under Sicily Tour).

En-route to Sicily, in a storm,  our main sail got damaged and torn.  This was quite disheartening as we were not sure that it was going to be repairable.   We were at a community considering what we were going to do when we heard some amazing news.  A very generous donor in England had given the ministry a very substantial gift that will almost pay off the mortgage that we have on the Next Wave.  We are still taking in this generosity but it is such a huge blessing to us and we are all so very thankful for God's blessing on us.

In addition to this we had come to Sicily to have a maintenance period and take the Next Wave into a dry-dock to scrape off the accumulated barnacles from the ship's hull and repaint, but had seen very little finance released to help pay our bills.  However within 10 days of arriving we have seen two thirds of the finance we need given to the ministry so there is much rejoicing on board.

One of our volunteers, Louis Novak, flew to France to join us for the sail to Sicily and he saw that the sails on board were badly needing repaired.  So just this week our team in YWAM Harpenden, England received a large box from Louis.  He had bought us an industrial sewing machine so that we can repair our own sails!  We are so thankful to Louis for his thoughtfulness and generosity.  Our current 1st Officer, Cheryl Smith can't wait to get her hands on this machine!

Assuming that five full days on the sea is a long time, we prepared ourselves for a tough sail!

Thanks to Matt, we just learned our basic sailing course and we plotted the position on the chart in the direction of Sicily! We invited some extreme-sports friends to help us out with the sail, and then we were going for it!
It was a very nice sail and at the end we survived it all by seeing dolphins, two whales and
some nice birds! God blessed us with good stomachs! We did survive it, but our lovely boat suffered tough winds. Three hours before we arrived in Sicily, the main sail tore and we were without sails.
We are praying for new sails and trust that God will provide, as He always does.
In Trapani we found out that we couldn’t stay for long, we didn’t raise the sail, but we did manage to motor to Syracuse!

We were planning to do two months of maintenance on the boat, the dock we had planned to use is not available any more due to severe storm damage, so we are now doing as much as possible in the water.
We may have a free port in Catania and we will be there until the end of May!
The only problem we have is that we don’t have enough sailing licences on board. We need a licence for a first mate! If you can help us with that please let us know!
Also if you want to help us with the mechanical refurbishment in Catania please contact the Marine Reach Ministries office via the website or email the ship directly via nextwave@marinereach.com. We have a lot of opportunities to work with churches and of course help with the maintenance is more then welcome too!

God bless
s/y Next Wave

Here is another article about us from the local paper. I tried to use freetranslation.com, but it doesn't make any sense. So we'll get Alex, a French-speaking student, to write it out in English. Until then, here is is in French.

Update: Here is a rough translation of the article, in English.

Tuesday February 11, the people of Séte were almost too preocupied with the cold to notice a singular procession: about 30 young people with festive costumes and make-up playing music all around the city.

The young people are stopped at the edge of the Alger quay in Sete on board a boat called the Next Wave. It is attached to the port of Liverpool [something about beating a British house. Not sure what that really means]. This steel boat was built 20 years ago in Sweden. It measures 400 tons for 45 metres of length and can sail perfectly with the \ sails but today a complementary motor is necessary. On this ship can seat 48 trainees, boys and girls of various origins. They receive for 3 months maritime and spiritual training. There, maritime training makes them suited to navigation, same night.

It is a joint experiment in both maritime and spiritual living. The ship belongs to an organization called Youth With A Mission, supported by the Protestant federation of France. It is anxious to train young people from the religious point of view (studying the Bible, prayers, conferences) and to bring them has to put their faith in action while taking part in humanitarian work, developing exchanges, causing friendships. The young people need their churches and communities to support them. The financings are rather problamatic. It is necessary for the 15 or so crew to raise [400] euros each.

Such as it is, the mission continues on its road. After Sete, it will be Ibiza, then Sicily. Perhaps on board, these young people will find an ideal life.