All good things must come to an end and the visit of the Fedaks had to end as well. The leaping off point for Mike, Sarah, Matt and Megan was the city of Preveza – interestingly enough the city that Tara will call home for the next 10 months or so.
We calculated the length of the trip by taking the 30 or so miles away, dividing by 7 and get about 4 hours distance; with dusk is at 20:00 so we can leave around 3 and get there in the light with plenty of time to spare. After a leisurely morning where, apparently some skinny dipping was partaken by the big girls (though I slept through the excitement) then breakfast, a little snack, swimming, reading and relaxing, watching the tripper boats come and go and some interesting anchoring techniques … it was time to go.
By this time we had about a 10 knot breeze on the beam so we hoisted up the main and pulled up the spinnaker and had a 4 hour downwind ride. The breeze was quite steady ranging between 8 and 11 knots – so our boat speed was between 6.5 and 8.5 depending on the windspeed and the angle that we steered the boat to. I don’t ever recall a longer, more relaxed spinnaker run … Tara was perfectly balanced, if we wanted to go a little faster I would hand steer and play the waves, when we got tired we let Otto (the autopilot) do his thing … and we sat back and enjoyed the ride.
Preveza is a classic stern-to-the-mole city where you put your anchor out, let it out while you’re reversing into the quay, then loop your stern lines on the cleats on the quay and tie up. Once tied at the stern you cinch your anchor up until you have a balancing act between being close enough to jump onto the boat, and far enough away to avoid being bounced into the quay.
Preveza itself is a lively town with more to it than tourism, so we walked around and found a taverna that had giros and other fare – ice cold Mythos, decent house wines and had dinner. One of the boys ordered a beer and the waitress asked ‘how old are you” … when the response “sixteen” came back she said “as long as you’re with your mother it’s OK”.
You gotta love Greece. After dinner, the kids went looking for gelato and found it, we retired to the boat and crashed after a long day of swimming and sailing.
The next morning we waved goodbye to the Fedaks at the rental car booth – thinking that in the next hour they will cover more miles in the car than we did in the boat the previous week. Their plan is to go to Delphi and then onto Athens, then flying to Vancouver.
Ours is to relax for the next week and then get Tara put away for the next 10 months, head to Germany for a week, then home to Vancouver.
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