Our journey up to Corfu was slightly different to that of Tony & his friends. The Levkas canal has been dredged and widened so that you no longer have to practically go onto the beach to get through and then the sail to Paxos was going really well until an un-forecasted storm arrived and we had to make a detour to the mainland under lightning, thunder, wind and horizontal rain. The boat got another good clean though and so did we!

The next day we headed further up the coast to Mourtos where we spent a couple of days during which there was another storm but that didn’t stop the Greek wedding that was going on ashore, they just sang louder to drown out the thunder! When we lifted the anchor to leave, Chris was a little surprised to find a substantial section of mast attached to the anchor when he brought it up! We did a double take before we were lucky enough to easily disentangle it all and head off to Petriti at the southern end of Corfu, where we met up with Tony again although this time he was joined by a couple of his children.

Our plan was to start to head north, jump over to Italy and then work our way along the foot of Italy back to Sicily but more stormy weather put paid to that for a while. We spent a week anchored off Corfu Town, under the beautiful setting of the old fortress and just sat it out. Whilst our forced stay there was unexpected, it did mean that we could visit the Mon Repos estate, birthplace of HRH Prince Philip, which was close by. The estate and villa was created in the 1830s by the second British Commissioner of the Ionians, Sir Frederick Adam, as a tribute to his Corfiot wife. Today, the villa houses the Palaeopolis Museum showcasing a wonderful and fascinating history of Corfu and displaying some archaeological finds. The wooded grounds provided welcome shade in the afternoon heat and led down to ruins of two Doric temples with views right across to mainland Greece and Albania. Well worth the visit.