Leaving Italy

Included in most of the diagrams of the ports provided in Rod Heikel’s books are the location of the Customs office. Unfortunately, this was not the case for Crotone. We set off from the boat looking for food and customs around 09:00. …. It turns out that we don’t really have any command of the Italian language and we didn’t have a computer or iPad to do a translation .. so we wandered around town, asked at a couple of places and then were helped by a civic employee who told us we needed to visit the Polizia … and gave us rough directions to get there. We wandered around the city and found ourselves in the car repair district – hopelessly lost. We asked this old guy where the Polizia were and he pointed down a street – we could see a building that had all sorts of antennas and such – voila – oops, wrong language. We found ourselves directed to the second piano (floor) and found the right office … OMG what incredible luck. To make it even better there was a guy that spoke English too. After a debate whether Albania is a Shengen signatory (as if) they took our passports and crew list and photocopied them and processed us out of the EU. They then drove us back to Tara to verify the two kids – who were just getting up from sleeping until noon. They then offered to drive us to a Supermarket so we could buy some provisions and were just really nice helpful guys. Amazing … now and then you find really nice people along the way.

Albania is out there...in that direction.

We left the dock just before 2pm, we wanted to fill up with diesel but they were closed for Siesta. When we were leaving the harbour the Q8 gas dock guy (who was filling up his tanks) started whistling and gesturing to us …. It took a second but I realized I was headed for the sand … so a quick 90 degree turn to the left and we missed the sand-bar – though we got within 20cm of hitting the bottom – assuming our calibration is correct to the millimeter. Not the beginning we wanted to have that’s for sure. We powered out towards the off-shore gas drilling platforms and pointed our nose at the north corner of Corfu – some 145 miles away.

Fun along the way.

More fun along the way.

We had all our sails up and were chuffing along close-hauled at around 7.5 knots with each of us driving for a half hour stint. Then the wind cooperated and lifted for us … making it a close reach – that Otto can easily manage. We had a 15 knot close-reach that lets us do about 7.5 knots of boatspeed … and we carried on like that until Midnight.

Sunset

Marina and Jessie take the 20:00 to 24:00 shift while I slept and Ross read his Nook (ebook device). By the time I came up top at 23:30 it was blowing in the 20’s and Marina and Jessie had just taken down the mainsail and had reefed the jib to the first reefing point. By midnight we were close to clearing the heel of Italy called Cap Santa Maria di Leuca and the waves and wind built. The midnight to 4am shift is managed by Ross and Matt … we had the Autopilot driving and started shortening sail even more.

Once we are solidly in the 8+ knot-speed boat range at night we shorten sail so that if a big puff comes it doesn’t overpower the boat. We ended up waking up Marina at 03:30 who came up and helped us shorten sail for the 3^rd time … leaving little more than a postage-stamp up – and still averaging over 8 knots for an hour. The waves continued to grow as we sent Ross to bed. I asked Marina to get us some harnesses as the waves were regularly 2 meters plus in height and a set of three would come every 5 minutes or so that were noticeably bigger. Harnessed in we continued to press on towards Corfu – with the sky beginning to lighten at 4:30 or so, to being quite bright by 5:30 and dawn just before 06:00.

Sunrise

We pulled in between the islands of Nisos Othoni and Mathraki, carefully avoiding shallows one mile off the coast, then turned in towards Sarande Albania. We had hoped the wind and waves would die when we tucked in behind Orthoni but they grew instead. Marina and I rolled up the jib we had let out and carried on for another hour in fairly big seas … 2-3 meters and winds 25-28 knots … then the wind died, we sparked up the motor and headed into Sarande.

Coming into Sarande, Albania

At this time I hit the hay having been up from midnight – Marina called me up at 10:00 saying we’ve arrived and it’s time to dock the boat – and we did. Handed our boat documents and passports to the expeditor and waited an hour for him to return with everything stamped.

After that Marina and I walked the beach and checked out the town – found an air conditioned grocery where we spent an hour cooling off and picking up some beer, wine and juice, then back to the boat, out for dinner and then home. When you stay up all night you may not seem tired but you’re not particularly functional either … off to bed and off in a day or two to head to Greece to meet up with our friends …..