How to Stay in the Schengen Area for more than 90 in 180 days - UP TO ONE YEAR STRAIGHT - EU Visas

Last year we took 8 months to sail across Greece, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy. This year we are sailing the rest of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. The journey could take up to 9 months... The issue is these are all Schengen countries and currently you are only allowed to be in the Schengen area for 90 in every 180 days. We had begun to give up hope and thought this next section of our sail would be impossible until we realized it was possible to apply for individual long stay visas for any Schengen country, and if granted your time in that country would not count against your Schengen time and in fact would help you reach that 180 days to reset your clock again. For us this country needed to be France because it was in the middle of our trip and we intended to spend 3-6 months there. We thought applying for a visa would be a smooth process, we applied at an application centre in Canada and were told to expect our passports back 15 to 45 days. Instead we got our passports and visas back 3 months later. Heres our experiences!