With our son Mitch flying out to join us shortly, we decided to survey the pick-up point in Corfu town. Rather than try the small marinas we dropped the hook in the main anchorage south of the peninsula topped by the old castle. As long as you pick the spot carefully to drop on sand and not weed and the wind is not strong from other than north, this is a good stop.

We looked at both Mandraki (difficult access to town) and Naok (apparently not under management so no charge but a rather dodgy seabed to drop on, we saw one boat stuck overnight) marinas and concluded that we would repeat the anchoring approach when Mitch arrives on Wednesday. Taking the dinghy into the corner of Naok is easy and free.

We managed to buy our Greek SIM card after a marathon two and a half hours with Vodafone. On our first visit the ‘man who does settings’ wasn’t there (we’d already hung around for 2 hours) and on our return the next morning he activated a SIM, decided it wasn’t working, spent the next two hours trying to get a different pre-activated SIM to change its programming and then, reverted to the original which worked first time! It’s a good job we know not to leave until we can see webpage updates as he regularly assured us it was working OK. The queue behind us weren’t that impressed though!


The anchorage at Ormos Garitas from the town walls

We had a comfortable night only rocking when the ferries charged past out in the channel.

Main Photo: The Old Castle at Corfu Town