This is the earliest in the year we have ever been to Greece, we landed on 12 April and checked into the Hotel Margarona. The lady on reception had a sheepish expression when the First Mate suggested it would be quiet at his time of the year. An hour later two bus loads of teenage school kids checked in and started running amock in the passages. They did provide mealtime amusement though. From our base for 3 nights we did the subsea-tunnel run back and forth to the boatyard and back. The centre-board job, the potentially most difficult task was completed on day one, with some new shims inserted and everything bolted back into place. To be frank the rest of putting up the canvas and all the covers seemed to go at quite a leisurely pace. It was hard work but over the years we have come to know the drill. We had all the sails on the boat before splashing in, following 3 ½ days of hard work. We slept on the boat in the yard on the last night before we left Cleopatra. There was something sad about it, Xenophon and his restaurant and staff and the familiarity of the Preveza Town quay and knowing the ‘lay of the land’ around town: the laundries, the chandleries, the hardware stores and the restaurants.

Then, as I typed the word "restaurants" in the last sentence, I looked up and thought … that hill is at a strange angle?….as I glanced at the navigation screen after 4 hours in 25 to 30 knots of our track charting a dense black scribble, showing the boat tacking round the anchor, I could see we had had a breakaway and we were dragging! An extra strong gust popped the anchor from the gloop. So there was drama for a while but we reset and by 18h00 the wind had dropped to 10 knots and we were off in the tender to the Vlikho Yacht club for dinner.

Back to the blog after that digression…. we headed for Lefkas to let Waypoint do the final tune up on the new rigging that was replaced over the winter. I had also discovered that when pressing the "Testeur de fuite" that only one light instead of two was illuminating. This was not good news, as it meant that somewhere a negative wire was leaking to the hull. Not good in a metal boat as it can mean, for galvanic reasons, that your boat starts shedding aluminium to the sea. After some research and help from the Allures and Garcia forum I narrowed it down to the VHF aerial, that had been replaced while they had the mast off. Waypoint were great, at first they did not believe me but after we disconnected the aerial at the base of the mast and the problem disappeared, we were in solution-finding mode and they were super helpful. The solution was finding a plastic/nylon bracket that isolated the aerial totally from the mast. We also spent time waiting for our EPIRB to come back from Athens and I fitted a new thruster battery as well as a new engine battery. We were in the expensive Marina for the first two nights in Lefkas and then on the new pontoons on the town quay for three nights (at ¼ the price), if they come around for the money at all. We got the EPIRB back on Thursday and left for Nidri/Vlikho to sit out the blow that we dragged in (see above).

From Vlikho we headed for Fiskardo and had a cracking sail on the wind for last 2 ½ hours. Fiskardo is the most pleasant of places and surprisingly, even at this time of the year we struggled to find a place on the town quay. We had to move twice but the reward was the best seat in the house, perfect as we had a corner quay that allowed us to not have to worry about the anchor or fear getting blown back onto the wall. This meant we could safely put the Hydrovane (called Juluka) and the towed generator onto the boat with no fear of them getting damaged against the back wall.

So here we are, doing walks and setting the boat up in passage mode, watching the Greek Orthodox Easter drift by our stern, as Greek families and tourists perambulate along the quay. In Greece Easter is celebrated a week later than in most places in the world. It looks like there is a weather window to leave on Wednesday, so fingers crossed that the PredictWind forecasts hold. With a bit of luck and the blessings of Poseidon and Neptune, next blog post from Malta.