For some reason, I forgot to post this when we left the boat in June 2022!

We are now back in the UK with Nimmie safely in the boatyard. I say safely but it was a close run thing. Not because of anything the yard did but because our neighbours in the marina pranged our boat! We had gone into town to meet up with our new Aussie friends, Dave and Shani, for the evening. We had spent the day continuing to do jobs on the boat in preparation for the delayed lift out on the Wednesday morning. This also gave us a chance to wash clothes and bedding. The latter by the laundry service in the marina. Anyway, we had dried our clothes on the guardrails during the day and moved them out of the way in case anyone came into the berth next to us. We weren’t too worried as the weather was incredibly benign with hardly a wisp of wind.

At 0900 we got the call from the yard to bring Nimmie round to the hoisting bay and again with no wind, it was an easy motor round. As the slings were being in place, we suddenly noticed one of the stanchions was bent back 45 degrees. We both agreed it wasn’t like that the day before but when we spoke to our neighbours, they completely denied any collision took place. Well, unless Yuri Geller was on board, it must have been them! As it happened we had a spare stanchion so we could replace it and bring the bent one back with us to hopefully get repaired in the UK. We couldn’t believe how they could lie to our faces but we had no evidence to contest their version of events. Lying sack of sh*ts! It took the edge of a lovely evening out and our last day in Greece for a while.

We spent a total of 23 days in Greece with at least 10 days either getting the boat ready to sail or ready to be lifted. We thought that when we were out at the beginning of May we had done a lot of the jobs required to launch her but we were surprised how many things needed fixing once she was in the water. With the toilet hose blocking and both shower pumps failing, it’s amazing how much you can’t check until you’re actually afloat. It did feel like a lot of effort for basically two weeks of actual sailing! However, once we were anchored in a bay, swimming in turquoise water and having a gin and tonic in the hammocks it all seemed worth it. Nimmie looked after us well although we will need to replace the anchor windlass and the fridge died just as we got back to Lavrion. We also noticed that there a small leak of engine coolant that we’ve asked the yard to look at as we couldn’t find the source.