I
had a really bad night’s sleep, which is unusual when I am on the boat. I had a whole load of crazy dreams and
in the early hours I started to worry about our anchor being fouled. The boat next to us has 6 or 8 (I never
really counted eastern European men, Russian, maybe). They speak no English and are rather weird. There is one huge obese guy who
helms. One skinny guy stays by the
boat and constantly smokes. One of
them slept in the cockpit in a sleeping bag.
Anyway.
I have been worried about their anchor since they came in. I was hoping that they would leave
before us and that would solve the problem. But they aren’t.
The morning is very fresh and clear and I can see in the water where the
anchor chains are lying and I really think their chain is over our anchor. Somehow I make my concerns known to
them. They are not leaving until
this afternoon. But they actually
are very helpful. They get out
their dinghy and row up as I take the anchor up. It is really touch and go. For a while it looks like it might be OK with the two chains
parallel to each other inches apart.
But at the last minute our anchor turned towards their chain and sure
enough the chain is over it and I can’t get the anchor up. After a lot of up and down they manage
to pull their chain off our anchor from their dinghy and we are off. Phew!
The
weather report was for very light winds of about 7 knots and sunny
weather. That is not what we
got. It is rather cloudy and there
is almost no wind at all. Most of
the time it is at about 2 knots!
So we just have a very long motor trip to Levitha. The sea is calm and there is no
problem. But it is dull.
We
get to Levitha at about 2:30pm. There
are only two other boats moored on the buoys. We can therefore choose a buoy that is quite close to the
landing stage, which is a help because our outboard is not working and Richard
will have to row ashore. I do my
new nifty form of capturing the buoy.
I get the pick up line and put our line through it and secure it to the
boat. That only takes a minute or
two. Then Richard swims out
to the buoy and I send him down another line to put through the buoy. I pick that line up from him with the
boathook and secure it to the boat.
Then I let the pickup line go.
Simple and quick.
As
Richard is already in the water I join him for a swim. It is getting more and more cloudy and
is not that warm, but the water is nice once you get used to it.
We
have a lazy afternoon. At one
stage it even rains! It is only a
very brief light shower, but unusual.
However I forgot to mention that we had a huge thunder storm in the
early hours of Monday morning when we were in Katapola. Richard woke up and ran all over the
place closing hatches and putting up the sprayhood. We managed to stay dry. That is the first rain we have seen this year.
What
we thought would be a quiet time here with few boats turns out not to be the
case. By the end of the evening
there were 11 boats here when there were only two others when we arrived!
Tonight
we rowed over to the farm to eat at their taverna. As usual they had fresh fish which he called barracuda. However, it was nothing like what I
would call barracuda. First of all
it was a small fish about the size of a largish mackerel. It was very meaty and tasty. We made our way back to the landing
stage with some difficulty in the pitch black. We had a torch, but it wasn’t really bright enough to find
the white painted stones that mark the path. But we made it safely to the dinghy and better than that
safely to the boat.
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