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Marina: The next few days were pretty lazy. We were still getting up really early but it helped us be productive.
Matt: I got up sometime around 06:00 and
started working. I closed the door to Jess’ cabin — now Marina’s, and made
myself a cup of coffee and did my email correspondence. Around 7am Marina
opened the door, made a cup of tea and did her email. We had a few things still to do on the boat, most notably raise the jib. We took a chance on the wind and got it up fairly quickly — though pulling
75 feet of 2mm round luff rope up the forestay groove requires patience as well
as liberal amounts of spray silicone. That’s the trick ... I remember showing
that to Marcel who struggled like mad getting his jib up and he nearly fell
over about how easy it was once he used the silicone. Now that we did our chore we needed to go to town
for marketing. I had some challenges with the dinghy motor and needed to do a little
McGyver’ing to get it working. Fuel was spilling out of the bowl .. I didn’t
close the drain screw so it was the first problem, then the o-ring wasn’t
seated correctly plus the fibre washer on the bottom failed ... so reseat the
set screw working it in and out with some grease, reinstalling the o-ring with
a little grease to hold it in place, then used some RTV Silicone to be the
washer on the bottom of the bowl. I’ll need to keep an eye on it as oil is OK,
but not 100% sure about gasoline. Marina hopped in the dinghy and took it for a
spin ... she was a little intimidated by the faster speed than Bonnie.
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| Matt testing out the new dinghy. |
I took
it for a spin too ... not too bad, definitely more squirrelly than Bonnie. We
didn’t want to landfill Bonnie so we resolved to put a “Free” sign on her and
let her go. We pulled up behind a fish boat ... and they took it. He has a son
at Lefkada and knows how to repair them and were delighted to take her off our
hands. Awesome pay forward for some young Greek guy.
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| Bonnie and her new owners behind. |
Then we decided to walk
around town — all the way past the bus station and then back, stopping for
lunch with a terrific chicken souvlaki ... then 116 Euros of groceries — about
4x what you get at home plus we had a couple bottles of wine, 12 beers and a bunch
of other stuff. We walked back to the beach where BB2 was ...what we think we'll call her ...and went back to Tara to unload.
We have definitely started a trend as there are now four boats anchored out, rare in Preveza... but awesome. There was quite a bit of weather coming through with rain and wind (also rare here) but as we got hungry we hopped in BB2 and headed to shore for pizza. Marina and I both remember having excellent pizza at this place in Preveza ... unfortunately it wasn’t the one that we went to and we ordered two large pies, which gave us leftovers for 2 days. It's still amazing to go out for dinner, get a bottle of fizzy water, a beer, and two large Pizzas for 30 Euros — or $45. At home it would have been $9 for beer, $20 each for the Pizzas and $5 for a bottle of water for $54 plus $7 tax and $8 tip for $70 ... quite a bit cheaper to live over here in Greece.
We have definitely started a trend as there are now four boats anchored out, rare in Preveza... but awesome. There was quite a bit of weather coming through with rain and wind (also rare here) but as we got hungry we hopped in BB2 and headed to shore for pizza. Marina and I both remember having excellent pizza at this place in Preveza ... unfortunately it wasn’t the one that we went to and we ordered two large pies, which gave us leftovers for 2 days. It's still amazing to go out for dinner, get a bottle of fizzy water, a beer, and two large Pizzas for 30 Euros — or $45. At home it would have been $9 for beer, $20 each for the Pizzas and $5 for a bottle of water for $54 plus $7 tax and $8 tip for $70 ... quite a bit cheaper to live over here in Greece.
Next morning we were up at 04:00 ... wow quite a bit of rain.
Loud enough to wake both Marina and I up. We closed the different hatches and buttoned Tara up. The wind is howling too. Wow, weird weather. Also
in Preveza the current is crazy fast ... like 2-3 knots. Last night when we
came back to the boat in about 10-15 knots, the boat was 90 degrees to the
wind, weather cocked into the current. If you ever fell off the boat, start
swimming to shore ... because unless you’re a really strong swimmer you’ll
never make it back to the boat! We got up in earnest at 07:45 and started our
day. The sun is trying to peak out, hopefully it will burn off all these clouds
and we’ll find our way to Pargas or Lakka today. We powered for about an
hour in Preveza at idle to get the fridge going and for Marina to get to the
Cleopatra mini-market for her British Cheese and humous. Unfortunately the greedy Brits got the good cheese (extra old) so she settled for just old. Out through
the channel ... which is bloody long, and then turned north where we split the difference between Paxos and Pargas, no
wind, just big waves ... like 2 meter rollers with the occasional breaker on
top. Pretty lumpy and enough to get a few burps (Balderdash!) out of Marina and
I felt a little woozy after being below for 5 minutes. Anyway, we started to
get our sea legs and a couple of other boats coming out of Lefkada (Bavaria 46’s
each with 6 Austrian men aboard) were powering behind us catching us up little
by little. We were doing the slow-power at 1900 revs but ... us being us, we couldn’t let them pass so we ended up going to 2300
and picked up another knot keeping them tantalizingly close but unable to pass.
The wind kept getting stronger so we eventually said “let’s sail” so we popped
out the Jib (had to tack onto starboard to get the port sheet on) and then
headed as high as we could. Luck would have us getting lifted the entire way to
Pargas. Eventually we passed the two boats that passed us while we put our
sails up, out pointing and badly out-speeding them (hee-hee-hee) and got into
Pargas on a close reach in the mid-7 knots range. Pargas was a little packed
but we found a spot and dropped our hook a respectful distance away from others
... something the Austrians neglected to do for us.
Anyway, we hunkered down and Marina made a simple but delicious meal of chicken, leftover pasta and a Greek salad. Awesome. We watched the moon a bit, but it was howling with wind and occasional rain. We ended up going down below at around 21:00 and both ran out of gas at the same time ... Marina was more energetic through the day as she had not had a nap (I had a 2 hour nap after we anchored) ... but in the end we went to bed at 9, just like old people.
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| The sun going down in Pargas. |
Anyway, we hunkered down and Marina made a simple but delicious meal of chicken, leftover pasta and a Greek salad. Awesome. We watched the moon a bit, but it was howling with wind and occasional rain. We ended up going down below at around 21:00 and both ran out of gas at the same time ... Marina was more energetic through the day as she had not had a nap (I had a 2 hour nap after we anchored) ... but in the end we went to bed at 9, just like old people.
Got up early — like 06:30 and sent out
our emails and messages. An early morning cereal and coffee fest, emails and reading. Around
9:30 we had a swim — for about 20 seconds. 19.85 degrees C was a little bit
cold for us. We lizarded on the forward deck for a little while and then we
headed down below for lunch. Lazy lazy lazy. We lit the engine at 11:30, we left Pargas and decided to sail as much as we could so we
pulled out the sails and then got headed, then tacked out and tacked back in
some decent breeze — well, let’s be honest here ... some wimpy breeze. We were
doing 3-4 knots of boatspeed for a couple of hours tacking up towards Corfu.
The westerly finally arrived and we rolled up the mainsail and went on with
just the jib at around 7 knots of boatspeed — pretty good. We still had 20
miles to go — wow 3 hours in and we had knocked off 7 miles, so we just kept
going. Part-way up Corfu we got headed some more and the wind lightened up ...
somewhat regretting putting the main away ... we just carried on with just the jib in a dying breeze. 15 miles to go
still ... at 16:00 ... we normally think in terms of 7 knots on a passage ...
28 miles, 4 hours. Today we were at 6 hours and still hadn’t made it half way
... but we kept on going until our boatspeed dropped into the 3’s and we were
30 degrees off our desired course ... on came the Yanmar and we made it there
in 20 minutes. We pumped up the SUPS and I had a chuckle at Marina trying to
maneuver the SUPS around bumping into shrouds and the main sheet, nearly
knocking herself overboard. We decided to go ashore for dinner and took BB2,
where when I tried to plane the boat the prop spun ... grrr ... need to go buy
a new prop. Oh joy. We wandered around Corfu and selected our Olive Garden
restaurant and shared a pasta dish with our favourite -- caprese salad, and mushrooms in
garlic. Quite delicious. We forgot but the price of wine in Corfu is double that on the
mainland ... keep that in mind. On Corfu -- drink beer! We made it back to Tara without further wrecking the propeller and watched
the moon come up over the horizon while drinking tea on the back of the boat.
