A Completely Different Perspective on Corfu City

The last time we went through Gouvia and Corfu was September 2010 (the 17^th to be exact) and while Gouvia is a nice marina our experience downtown Corfu was that it was pretty seedy and dirty. Turned out that we were going to the ‘East Van’ side of Corfu and completely missed the “West-end” side of the equation.

The Crew of Tomskii Kastan

After watering and gassing up at Gouvia we left with Tomskii at around 2pm. We were happy to power most of the way but Marcel pulled out his sails and so we were guilted into putting ours up too. There was 8-10 knots of breeze and we were only going a few miles …. So what the heck. We pulled out the jib and main and, as always when two boats are sailing we were in a  bit of a race.

Corfu's Old Town

If Marcel was one of my sail-boat racing buddies I would have quipped “you need to raise the anchor before you go sailing“ as Tara sailed away from Tomskii so far that we ended up tacking around and going back to meet them. We then sailed into the Old Corfu harbour side by side in about 2 knots of wind. The girls jumped off Tara and swam to Tomskii who rolled up their sails and anchored. Ross and I were left on Tara sailing under the main alone. Ross was impatient but I was happy sailing, drinking a Heineken.  Out of the blue a 70 foot old IOR boat came in at 9 knots and snagged the anchoring spot beside Tomskii – using the patented ‘drop your anchor while moving forward at 5 knots technique while nearly running over the dinghy of the guy you’re anchoring behind manoeuver.’ We dropped anchor a hundred meters further inshore on this rocky bottom and put out a mile of chain.

Tara at anchor beside Corfu's Old Town

That evening we went in to dinner – Tomas was off to a festival in Budapest Hungary meeting up with some buddies and then home to Holland for 2^nd year of Applied Physics at University. The night before they had picked up Yelena’s son Anton who lives in Prague with his friend Seba – short for Sebastian and these two now joined the Tomskii crew. 

Yet another excellent dinner out - with the Tomskii clan.

The older kids went back to the boat with Ross and Joost who stayed to play video games, while the rest of us explored Corfu’s Old town. 

Jess and Yelena hanging out at the Old Fort.

At the Old Fort

We all met up at the dinghies – Marcel, Yelena, Jessie, Marina and me going back to the boat to hit the hay, and the three 20-year-olds going out to the clubs at 23:00 …  I wonder when they got back to the boat.

We had a quick beer on the back of Tomskii, picked Joost off Tara and deposited him back home, then called it a night – with a beautiful harvest full-moon peeking up over the horizon.