BACK IN GREECE
Welcome back to those who are following along with our continued adventures sailing on our catamaran Phantomas.
Last year saw us end the season in eastern Greece on the island of Leros where we lifted the boat out of the water and left her in the care of Artemis Boat Yard. The yard is a little bit isolated, and the nearest town is about 4 km away, but the hire cars are cheap, and the island is small enough to get to a town very quickly. The yard has a good reputation, so you tend to overlook the smaller inconveniences.
Tony returned to the yard in the middle of May to do the annual repairs and improvements to the boat. He is kind enough to realise that it’s not worth me joining him at the same time because there isn’t much that I can do to help him. This means I got three extra weeks at home to say goodbye to friends and family and get up to whatever I liked. Plus, the extra weeks apart means I do get to miss him slightly before we then spend lots of “quality time” together.
The major projects this year was the installation of an air conditioning unit in the salon. This did mean that I lost some valuable kitchen real estate to the air con when it was fitted in my pot cupboard. An electric winch was fitted in a back locker in preparation for lifting our new “car”, fondly known as Henry Highfield. Our car is what we call our tender/dinghy. We indulged ourselves with a new Highfield 3.1m tender with a 20hp Mercury which is a bit of an upgrade from the Tohatsu 9.8h/p. Our old dinghy, as our visitors will attest, needed an upgrade as each time we used it, Tony would need to use a foot pump to put more air into it.
Another reason for the delay in starting our sailing season was the process of applying for an extended visa for Spain. The process turned out to be much more arduous than the previous years’ experience of applying for an extended visa for Greece. It’s a bit of a long story but suffice to say we have lighter wallets for the experience, a later start date for the season and there’s still more hurdles to jump when we arrive in Spain. Oh, joy!
We had hoped to visit Turkey before we left the eastern side of Greece but with the delays mentioned above, we had to decide to not go. As part of the Spanish visa requirements, we must present ourselves in Spain by early August and to safely travel from Leros to Barcelona we will need all of the two months to get there.