The winds were forecast to increase over the next few days so we left Astros and played motorboat (we had no sails) across the gulf for 3 hours to get to Splice's winter home. The skipper was a bit un-nerved by the trip, there's always the sails if the motors play up but not this time...but all was well and we dropped anchor 400m from the lift at the yard. We are glad we moved early as we have now had two days and nights of gusty winds topping out at 25 knots which would have made things lumpy out there.

The first evening we had a bit of a shock......the beer wasn't very cold! We had motored across which charges the batteries and had the fridges on all day. Major disaster loomed, the skipper can't live with warm beer in Greece. Investigations the next morning found that the beer fridge was not cooling at all, luckily the other fridge seemed fine and all the food and a nights allocation of beer were transferred to that. A call to the yard found there was no refrigeration engineer there so we were stuck..... until Carolyn remembered that the owner of the accommodation we use here used to be a refrigeration technician before retirement. We dinghied ashore and he talked us through how to check the thermostat as this was the first place to check.

Back on board all the gear stored in port forward came out and the boards came up. Chris created a cable to isolate and bypass the thermostat and we started up the fridge. The condenser started back up, great, so the condenser (expensive - Euros 350+) was not the problem but now we had a fridge with no thermostat. After a little more fiddling Chris realised that another component, a small circuit board that dictates the condenser revolution speed, could be affecting the circuit so he swapped that with the same item from the disused freezer condenser. Success, everything worked again and cold beer was back on! All that hassle for a 3cm board with a couple of components on it! Hopefully we can source another spare.

The offending circuit board

We are working through our close-down list and have completed all the 'in water' tasks ready for our lift out tomorrow morning. The forecast is still for strong gusty conditions but we know the lift bay and it should be possible unless the winds really get up.

We then have four days to put Splice fully to bed before our drive to Athens and flight back to the UK. Looking at the news we do wonder if we'd be better staying!!

Main photo: The view across to the Travel-lift that will lift Splice out of the water on 2nd October. The structure supports large slings that go under the boat and pull her up.