I jerked the manual drive car a couple of times after 20 years of not driving manual, and Colleen has declared herself a better driver and won’t acceed the helm. Needless to say she has her share of grinding and ten point turns over the curb at the dead end, but she is not easy to sway. (Colleen here & adds “He exaggerates - I drive way better while he is better at navigation haha)
We stayed in a efficiency, it was in suburban Agioi Theodore, which is to say the last row of houses before the olive trees. We shared the common “courtyard” with a grandma and cute dog named Bobo which means little baby. He would here us moving around in the morning and be at the door ready to say good morning. It would be nice to have Bobo along for the ride.
We are living on the boat now, in Almira Shipyard. Almira is a true shipyard. There are no pools or clubhouses or socials, not even a marina, or even a dock! The boats are lowered or backed into the water and then they just go. The catamarans like ours are picked up from the middle and backed in by an old Russian looking truck, when they get near the incline into the water they run a tow rope to another truck with a huge chunk of concrete in the bed. I can only imagine what led to the two trucks, maybe there was another truck before these that couldn’t cut it and just kept going?
We passed the first Greek test for puttin the boat in the water and got a Greek transit log. You first need to obtain a transit log for your boat through customs then you need to go to port police to get a stamp in your transit log. The transit log requirements were long and varied. We even had to send a copy of our boarding passes which were luckily stuffed in a side pocket. The port police are rumoured to be allowing cruisers on Monday, which is coincidentally when we are scheduled to launch.
We have been working hard on the boat. Colleen traded Bikram yoga for deep cleaning and sail wrangling. It is hard to say where the day goes. In order to get a battery replaced under warranty, it took meeting and talking with multiple people multiple times. In the end a guy appeared this morning with a new battery and we are all set with that.
And I (Colleen) will add that Peter’s knowledge & his ability of figuring things out have saved us time & frustration but even with that there are problems that just need that extra “expertise”. One of those issues was a screw that was stuck in the main sail car on the mast from when we think they did the inspection for us when we were buying her. After trying the old WD 40 & banging it we had to wait a few days until the “technician” showed up to try & fix it. We could not put the main sail on until we were able to connect it to the car that is attached to the mast. So picture this scene... 1 guy shows up at 7 ish after working in the yard all day and he basically does what Peter already tried. 1 guy turns eventually into three with banging the crap out of it with a hammer, to getting a welder to try and heat it up, to drilling it out & then hitting the crap out of it again with a hammer. It finally worked, not pretty but then about 10pm at night Peter & I managed to get the main sail connected to the mast, on the boom & nicely wrapped up in the cover. Besides the welding part we laughed because Peter was like I could have done that but thought they would have some piece of machinery that would work better. Everyone here has been very nice in the shipyard & it’s rush rush rush all day with them.
As Peter mentioned above it is definitely a shipyard and not a marina. I line up with the guys to use the bathroom in the morning, I feel like I should bum a smoke from one of them. (Actually I should mention that I have seen my fair share of guys who chose to make their bathroom under various boats but at this point I would if I could too) ;-)
We saw the Corinth cut which is straight and deep and built in 1893. Unfortunately the cut had a landslide so we cannot go through as planned. They have been fixing it since December, the president said it is over 100 years old and it has lasted this long is impressive. It would be impressive if they could shore up the walls and open it back up.
The food has been great, tonight we had fried squid. It looked a lot like the bait we use in Rhode Island to catch flounders, but once past that it tasted great. We also had a salad of shredded up vegetables like a coleslaw. Overlooking the water with good people to watch made it interesting. The weather is shorts mid day, and light sweaters in the evening.
We added a link on the right to a google drive that we can put post pictures to.