Mark 1 Eyeball – Sometimes the best of all Navigation tools

Tara has all types of navigation tools onboard, several GPS’s, AIS, Radar, Chartplotters, depthsounders, wind instruments. We find we rely on the iPad using Navionics because of its very high accuracy, easy to use and understand interface, and it is portable and can live on-deck.

The "new Lefkas floating bridge" AKA a ferry turned sideways

The conflagration called the Lefkas Canal

Hand steering on the way to Pargas

To get to Corfu we need to go through the Lefkas canal. At dinner on Meganisi we learned that the floating bridge was sent to Pireaus for refit and a ferry is wedged between the roads on either side and once every three to four hours it opens. The kids were off with Marcel Scuba-diving and by the time they got back and we motored off the dock at Porto Spilio it was 10:45 and we had 11 miles to go. Not a chance. Had we left at 10:30 it would have been 50:50 so it meant we were leaving Lefkas on the 3:30 “ferry opening”.

We used this time to anchor outside the Lefkas canal on the south side and do some swimming and floating in 26 degree water, then we motored up the channel and anchored in Lefkas town. I sorted out another 12 gigs of Internet for 30Euros – roughly half what I pay at home post-pay … in spite of what anyone tells you, it is true that Canada has very high mobile phone prices (OK get off your soapbox!). I had taken my iPad with me to get 4 more gigabytes of internet and the battery was maybe 50% charged when we got back to the boat … (if this were a movie you could call this foreshadowing).

Sailing into Pargas at sunset

We picked up the anchor and entered into the gong-show that is the Lefkas Canal – where someone will cut in front of you and then go really slow – kind of like driving in Vancouver come to think about it. Anyway we followed this little French boat through the opening and about half way through the tightest part of the canal I had to yell at him to get going – I was in Neutral and charging up behind him … a couple of “Vites vites” coupled with our 45kilo anchor a few feet from his head got him to open the throttle a little bit. I can never figure out why he desperately needed to cut in front of us in a 1 boatlength gap and then proceed to open up the gap to 20 boatlenths … weird.

The wind was pretty favourable and since we need to get Jessie to Corfu for her flight on Sunday morning, we were hoping to get the 30 miles to either Gaios or Pargas. The wind chose Pargas for us and it is pretty much directly ahead when we’re on port-tack out of the Lefkas Canal – hey this is good, we can sail for a few hours.

We tried to let Otto steer for a while but in reality I can steer about an average of 1-2 knots faster than the autopilot when closehauled to the wind. I think it’s because it tries to steer too straight a course, the boat slows down and then gets into a negative feedback loop. When I am driving I am constantly bearing off making the boat go fast, then bringing it up into the wind for point and then go through the same process as the boat slows down and I put the bow down to build speed. When you get good at it the rudder movements are very slight and course corrections are in 1 or 2 degrees or perhaps fractions of degrees. Notwithstanding it makes a huge difference going 6.5 knots upwind instead of 4.5 knots – particularly when you have 28 miles to go (e.g., 4 hours 20 minutes vs. 6 hours 15 minutes) so we hand steer.

You have an hour or two of hand steering in you before you need a break.  I can go longer but that’s because I have incredible concentration skills and superhuman stamina. It might also be because I can hold my pee longer than anyone else on board. Anyway after a couple of hours I handed off to Marina and she was hand steering the boat on port tack from the low side. We were still a long way from shore but we were in 10 meters of water and she asked me when we should tack. At that moment she yelled ‘tack’ "GO GO GO GO!". There... about 50 feet from the bow (we’re doing 6 knots which is about 10 feet per second) is a massive rock – like the size of the boat and it is submerged just a few feet under water. We’re not sure whether she steered us through the tack from the lee helm or I did from the weather helm. No doubt in our minds that we would have hit that hard enough to sink the boat and probably injure ourselves in the process.

We might have tacked earlier had we been using the iPad ....

The rock is that red dot -- is actually to the right of where it shows
on the chart .. directly in our path. It is also the only rock
within a half mile and nearly a mile off shore in 10M of water 

After a few seconds of hyperventilating we called urgently for the iPad that was charging downstairs because we had only 10% battery left an hour before (remember the foreshadowing?) and fortunately all was fine and this was a rogue rock hundreds of meters off shore without any other rocks nearby.

Thank goodness for Marina paying attention to where she was going and a quick response to avoiding a potentially very bad outcome.  New rule on Tara … less than 20 meters of depth – iPad is on deck.