We're still on the hard and work is progressing well. We're booked to be lifted back into the water on Monday and we're looking forward to that. The weather has improved dramatically, it regularly reaches 25+ and the wind seems to be back to it's predictable ways.

Andy has been hard at work painting the hull. The topsides (white and grey bits) are done, we have a new 'boot top' (the blue bit), and the hull is primed ready for anti-fouling tomorrow and Saturday. We had a result with the boot top paint. We didn't have a boot top after the last paint up, we dropped the grey down and brought the anti-foul up to cover the white stripe that had been there. This time we'd discussed it and thought that it would be an idea to restore the boot top as the grey paint had peeled off in that area. I went over to the shower block one day and sitting outside in the bookswap area were two tins of hard anti-foul paint. They were still there when I came out so I brought them back to the boat and they are now the blue stripe you can see in the photos. The boot top is an area on the waterline that is painted with hard anti-foul so that it can be scrubbed. The rest of the anti-foul is 'soft' or self-eroding so that it stays effective for longer. Andy is currently replacing the black rubbing band and then we can start anti-fouling tomorrow.

We've had the new sewing machine out and have repaired our flag and staysail. We had to completely remove the sacrificial strip from the sail as it was falling apart. The sail is now back on the furler and we'll replace the strip next winter once we get back down to Crete.

We hired a car for a day last week and drove over to Epidavros to collect the paint that we'd stored there. It was good to see the friends we had made last year and we managed to get a Lidl's shop in too! We've met quite a few people here and had a bbq in the yard on Sunday which went on for most of the day. We've also been for SODS (Six O'clock Drink Society - they named it not us!) with Jenny, Peter and Charles a couple of times. Jenny, Peter and Charles moved on board their ferro-cement boat in 1982 after building her themselves and they've been living aboard in the Med ever since.

Tonight we're going out for a meal to a taverna we've been to a couple of times before to celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary - the first night out since we left Crete.