Where's an English speaking Greek fisherman when you need one
12 April 2014 | Oreoi
George. Sunny.
It's launch day minus 5. Fandancer will be getting a wet bottom on Wednesday, fingers crossed, so I thought I should resurrect this blog. We arrived back in Oreoi over a week ago, after a very successful and interesting three day stopover in Athens.
Once again, we are staying in the Paralio apartments in Oreoi, just along from the pharmacy, run by the charming Mr Thanassis, and we have exactly the same room as we stayed in last October. Partial views of the harbour, mountains in the distance, and most excellent wifi.....
So, we've hired a car for a fortnight, which helps,with the general running about, such as driving to the next town, Istiaia, as there is no cash machine in Oreoi. There's a Lidl on Istiaia too, good news for us boaters living on a shoestring - a litre of milk is only 95c in Lidl, but 1.75euro in the mini market.
I thought I would tell you about the antifouling episode. Don't worry we haven't applied any yet, this first saga occurred when we went on a mission to buy some. Sorry Dimitris, but we are the sort of people who always try to get a bargain and don't like paying full price for anything, a typically British trait....... so after discovering the Greek word for antifouling paint - which is 'moravia', we firstly hit the Internet to see if we could get the same thing more cheaply, with moderate success. I emailed chandlers in Athens, a paint supplier in Germany, and an online shop. All looked like possible suppliers of the product, and I awaited the replies.
Meanwhile, as we had the car, we decided to combine a road trip with attempting to buy some antifouling paint. Ideally, we would bump into an Ancient Greek fisherman, fluent in English, who,would sell us a barrel of fishing boat paint from the back of his wagon, for a pittance. Second best scenario was to find another fluent English-speaking fisherman who knew where we could buy some. As we had heard there was a fishing boat harbour in nearby Pefki, this seemed a good place to start. No fishing boat harbour anywhere. We drove up,and down the coast, but to no avail. So Tim took the plunge and waded confidently in to the middle of a group of Greek men outside a cafe, and like we all do when speaking to foreigners, we resort to a type of pidgin English, avoiding elaboration, verb endings or adjectives. "You speak the English?" was his opening line. I crossed my fingers and held my breath....
One of the group replied with a Greek-American accent, and we discovered there was no fishing boat harbour, and we could by paint in the boatyard in Oreoi. That's where we've just come from! Anywhere else? "Istiaia, behind the little church. "Ask for a man called Zagapagagadadapadopolois", or at least that's what we think he said.
So off we went to Istiaia. After two false starts, where we incorrectly enquired in what appeared to be a general store, and also a pet/fishing shop, we walked into the hardware shop across the square, confidently expecting to pick up as many 2.5L tins of antifouling in every colour of the rainbow that we wanted. How wrong we were. With us having virtually no Greek, and them having no English whatsoever, we were led to a secret aisle at the back of the shop. A bit like Harry Potter and platform 9 and three-quarters..... "Moravia!", he proudly declared, and pointed to a tiny tin with a rusty lid. The tin contained .75L. Barely enough to fill your galley measuring jug with room left over for a swirl of cream. Who would buy antifouling in such small tins!
He proudly read out the description on the tin in fluent Greek., of which I understood nothing. At this point, I felt like saying, "it's all Greek to me!" But I bit my tongue. We established that it was 10 euros a tin. We made him grovel deeper for more tins. We wanted eight. He found six in total.
No problem. A Greek minion was summoned and despatched on a moped to find more paint, he was back in a flash, but with only one more tin, this time even more rustier than the others and the lid taped up with masking tape. We couldn't guess from where it was procured. Dare we ask for an eighth tin? We understood that if we came back tomorrow he would,have another tin for us.
We decided to leave while we were ahead, but fate dealt us one last blow. '"Kokkino" he announced. I thought he was offering us a glass of wine, but it turned out to be the colour of the paint. Red was our least preferred colour - the hull of Fandancer would look like a shining red beacon beneath the waves, but might scare away the jellyfish, so we decided to go for it. It was cheap, after all and beggars can't be choosers.......