Happy New Year to all our friends and family. The festive season was fantastic, spent with great friends with plenty of good food and drink and partying. Now it's time to diet and detox - our bodies and wallets!

Christmas was spent in the Miakoda Bar with 8 of our friends. Christmas dinner was cooked by myself, Lynne and Anne and the washing up was shared out by the boys. Santa came to visit us all in the shape of home made crackers with small gifts. I got a BB gun so that we can shoot at the crows that sit on our mast (the catapult broke), it's not very accurate but it does scare them off. Andy was given a complete set of ladies lingerie - the mind boggles - he did wear it for a while on Christmas day - see photos.

After dinner we played with the Lidl's electronic game thing that we'd done battle for earlier in the week, it was okay but not as good as a Wii. The board games came out then and we spent the next five hours playing Cranium. We've had the game on board for years and have never played it. Highly recommended though, a very funny game that keeps going forever.

We spent a couple of days recovering and then it was time to prepare for Andy's birthday. I'd (foolishly) suggested that I would do a curry night for our friends and ended up cooking curry for 12! Two days of preparation produced plenty of wonderful food that was appreciated by all. There was also enough left over for us all to take some home. Ours lasted for another couple of days and, at the moment, we're all curried out!

New Year's Eve was spent in the Miakoda Bar again, a few of us had a great time dancing and laughing and seeing the new year in. We're now ready to enjoy the peace and quiet for a few days.

Unfortunately the peace has been shattered by a leaking hot water tank. The tank last developed a leak about 2 years ago and it was spot welded to repair the problem. This time we're going to get a new bottom made up to permanently fix the problem. Andy is currently in the middle of getting the tank out (a big job as it is positioned very awkwardly). We've got no heating as the heater fuel tank also has to come out to make way for the water tank. We've located a stainless steel fabricator in Agios Nikolaos so we'll call him tomorrow and hope that he can help us straight away. We were hoping to sail to Sitia for a couple of days on Wednesday but that all depends on whether the water tank has been repaired.