Sicily, six years ago. Covid lockdown in effect. Our friend got trapped ashore, living on his boat atop a ladder, work unfinished and unable to launch, even if there had been a crane operator.
The boatyard workers gave him the key to the gate and told him they were shutting down until further notice, good luck and by the way there's no running water.
They left him "Merkel" the boatyard dog, too.
Zooming down "Rio Lidl" in 2020, a small creek on Korfu (Greece) with a very shallow entrance that you can (just barely) navigate by dinghy if you can feel your way past the shallows and an undersea pipeline.
About 10 minutes upriver, you will come to a concrete road bridge. Locals have built ramshackle docks next to and under the bridge, hammer drilling into the structure to attach their fasteners, something that might see you persecuted elsewhere but is perfectly normal in Greece.
Scramble up the side of the bridge and you're on a road which just a few steps apart has a fuel station, a wine shop and across the road, a Lidl supermarket. Supply paradise!
#Greece #CruisingLife #Memories #Lidl #Sailing #Shopping #Korfu
Shopping in the gulf of Patras in 2019, just west of the Corinth canal. It was just about calm enough to anchor in the open. Took the dinghy to the beach, walked across the road to Lidl and came back with as many bags of food (and UHT milk) as our little folding boat could carry.
The local beachgoers gave us somewhat bemused looks when schlepping all this past them, but budget cruisers don't like paying for marinas or taxis 😁
Typical sailor meetup: Share cake and expertise, in this case about varnish.
Yes that pack says 80 quid on it and that was back in 2016.
Sorting photos, which requires reading old logbook entrys to find out which place the photo was taken in (based on timestamp).
Typical for night sailing, things go clunk and you never find out what they were 😸
"Something wenk clunk while motoring on Friday 22:30 and the saildrive started making intermittent weird sound. Probably hit something. Put gear in neutral and sound stopped. Tried reverse and heard another small clunk - after this the weird sound in forward was gone, so probably wrapped something around the propeller and putting it in astern got rid of it. Anchored in Siracusa harbour [..]. Dived the next day to look at propeller, no signs of anything out of the ordinary."
#Sailing #CruisingLife #Memories #ThingsThatGoClunkInTheNight
2019 aboard Songbird, installing the replacement watermaker in the engine compartment.
Our boat had the most accessible engine room of any 40 footer I've seen (yes, including the Sirius 40 DS), but it was still a cramp inducing job.
Cruising on our small sailboat, I pulled out the ColReg's for a little light reading.
Today, five years ago. Somehwere in Ionian Greece.
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Y⃒̸̷̝̜̙ͥͥͥngmar
Janet Fraser
Alexandria Key