May 7-8, 2023.

We left Himarë for Sarandë, about 20 miles south, enjoying a pleasant motoring trip along the Albanian coast. From now until we reached our goal of being "someplace within ferry range of Athens" - where we needed to be by the last week of May - we wouldn't be dallying in any anchorage longer than we had to. As we neared Sarandë, I called the port control officer on VHF Ch 11, to request permission for Awildian to enter the port. Just as in Dürres, I was treated to a friendly interaction. He welcomed us to Sarandë, and told me that Awildian was free to enter.

Some views of Sarandë's beachfront







As soon as we'd dropped Awildian's anchor (named Obama, remember?) in the bay, I contacted our agent, Jelja Serani, to let her know that we'd arrived. She arranged to meet us "at the dinghy dock near the Customs building, by the pink ferry terminal." These were easy to spot, along the shoreline, among the boxy apartments.


The meeting place

A few minutes and a short dinghy ride later, we met Jelja, who took us through the building and up the street to her office at Saranda Summer Tours. While there, she showed us points of interest on a photocopied map of Sarandë - the locations of grocery stores, a bank, a produce market, an old Jewish synagogue, a couple of nice restaurants. All of those would have been handy to know about, if we'd been staying longer, but we wanted to leave at first light. Sadly, we'd be leaving Albania without barely scratching the surface of this interesting and anachronistic nation. Maybe another time, when we weren't in a hurry to get somewhere, we could come back and do a proper exploration.


Awildian hanging out in the anchorage

We returned to Awildian with Jelja's promise to contact us around 7:30 pm with our signed exit paper. There was still some ambiguity around whether the port captain would check us out of Albania tonight (a Sunday) and allow us to leave in the morning. We had our fingers crossed.

It was warm in Sarandë! I pulled some of my shorts out of storage and swapped them for my blue jeans. The first time I was in shorts this year! I hung a load of laundry on the lifelines and waved at the passengers of a big "Pirates of the Caribbean"-themed boat, who were dancing to the thumping music as it passed close to Awildian. There was nothing else to do but enjoy the rest of the day, while we waited for Jelja to do her magic.

Jelja called us at 7:15pm, to tell us that our exit paper was ready. She confirmed that passports aren't stamped in Albania anymore, at least not for boat passengers; I don't know about air passengers. Eric went to shore with a bar of dark chocolate, to thank Jelja for working for us on a Sunday. He came back with our exit paper and the go-ahead for leaving in the morning. Perfect!

The next morning, we were up at 4:30am, and after waking up with some coffee, and allowing the sky to lighten a bit, were pulling Obama up by 5:10am. I called the port control officer, to let him know that we wanted to leave. Once again, I received a friendly and professional interaction, followed by his wish for us to "have a safe journey." Nice people, those Albanian port control officers.

It was about 70 miles to Preveza, Greece, our intended destination.



We motored all day, sometimes with the jib up when there was enough wind to make it worth our while, arriving at the buoyed channel outside Preveza at 3pm. We navigated the channel, passed Preveza Marina, and entered the anchorage just beyond.

We initially had a bit of trouble getting anchored. The water was a dark green, and so murky that we couldn't see the bottom, even in less than ten feet of water.


No chance of seeing what's down there

It was all supposed to be mud, so it should have been straightforward for Obama to dig in. The first place we dropped the anchor, in about 9 feet of water, Obama couldn't grab onto anything, and went skipping along the bottom as we backed up. This was telegraphed through the chain as what I call "chattering," as it dragged across something rough. If Obama couldn't get a good grip, then this clearly wasn't a suitable spot to anchor. So we pulled Obama up and drove around the anchorage some more, looking for a better place, never fun when you've been up since sparrow's fart and traveling all day. Eventually we found a likely spot a bit farther from the marina, in about ten feet of water. We still couldn't see the bottom, but Obama dug in immediately, and held when we backed up. That was more like it!


Anchoring

Eric took the dinghy into the small fishermen's harbor, where he tied it to the quay and took our boat documents to our agent's office, to start the clearing-in process for Greece. Though agents aren't required for clearing into Greece, as they are in Albania, we'd decided to use Sofia Gravani at All About Yacht, who would speed up the process, a multi-faceted task requiring trips to several different government offices. Eric returned a little while later, with only a part of the clearing-in finished; Sofia told him that the rest would have to be done the next day.

We contacted our friends, Seb and Suzanne (remember them from our time in Albania), who were now in Preveza Marina on board Racoon 2. They were in the process of getting long-term Greek visas; Preveza Marina would be their base. We met up and enjoyed a nice dinner with them, in one of the restaurants on the waterfront (only 10 euro for an entire grilled sea bream!). It was here that we first tried retsina, a Greek variety of white wine that's fermented with pieces of Aleppo pine mixed in, giving it a taste and aroma reminiscent of Pine-Sol. It was good to try retsina, because it wasn't our favorite, and we could avoid it the rest of the time we were in Greece. (Though one time I picked up some by accident, not having read the word "retsina" that was clearly written on the label in Greek: ρετσίνα. Silly me.)

The next morning, we met Seb and Suzanne at Sofia's office, where we all piled into her tiny car for the short ride to the government building. While Sofia had long conversations in Greek with the various officials, we hung out in the hallway. About a half hour, Sofia emerged, and gave us all a ride back to her office. We walked over to the post office with one of her coworkers, to pay for our tepai (Greek tourist tax) for the three months we intended to be there, and then went back to All About Yacht. (You can pay for your tepai online, but we hadn't this time.)

Sofia told us to come back at 4pm to pick up our transit log, which we're required to carry with us while cruising in Greece (more on transit logs later). When we told her that we'd hoped to leave Preveza earlier than that, she suggested that we call her in an hour and a half.

In the meantime, Eric and I wandered around Preveza.



We got a Cosmote SIM card for my phone (Cosmote and Vodafone being our options), bought some really good-looking tomatoes and other veggies from a sidewalk produce market, and stopped into a linen store that had...SHEET SETS.


The linen shop!

You might be wondering why I'd be so excited about sheet sets. Here's why: before we left Montenegro, we'd shopped for sheet sets. We wanted some nice, new sheets for our guest bed, for all the guests who would be joining us in the summer. In the US, sheet sets always have a fitted sheet, a flat sheet, and two pillow cases. So that's what we were looking for. You can't buy them like that in Montenegro. All we could find, after visiting many stores, were a few sets, and these included only a fitted sheet and two pillow cases. No top sheet. Which is apparently how they're sold, in Montenegro. We'd bought two of these sets and were planning to use our current, white top sheets along with them.

So when we encountered a linen shop in Preveza that had shelves and shelves of sheet sets, in lots of different colors and patterns, we were stoked! I asked the proprietor if the sets had TWO sheets in them. He said yes, but they had two flat sheets, and no fitted sheet. OK, I thought, I can definitely work with that. In fact, on a boat like ours, where the mattresses are funky shapes and you can't walk all the way around the bed, having a fitted sheet isn't all that great, anyway. So we each chose a pattern that we liked and bought them. Score!

Next, we went in search of lunch. Like Croatia and Montenegro, and probably other places we haven't been to yet, many of the cafes served drinks only. We could get coffee, or ouzo, but no food. After a bit of a wander along Preveza's pretty cobblestoned streets,



we ended up at the waterfront, where we found a restaurant that served food. While we were there, our friend, Trevor, whom we knew from Porto Montenegro, walked by, and stopped for a chat. It always amuses us, that we can be anywhere and run into people we know from other places.

After lunch, we walked back to Sofia's office, where she handed us our transit log. The final piece of our clearing-in paperwork now procured, we paid her fee, thanked her and headed quickly back to Awildian, hoping to make it to the northern terminus of the Levkas Canal in time for its next opening, on the hour.