Realities of Sailing

Sailing is not always the glamorous image you see in photos and videos where the sails are perfectly aligned to a gentle wind that takes you in exactly the direction you want to go to while you relax on a sunbed enjoying light canapes!

I think my intro is a reflection of the week we had 😊, it was a rough one to say the least.  First we had the Medicane (Ionis) hit close to where we were, following that we had a problem with water in our saildrive oil which led to having to lift the boat out of the water, sleep on it while it was on drydock then move to a destination 70NM out to find that the work done on the boat created a leak in not one but TWO engine rooms which meant we had to change our plans and go in search of another marina, lift the boat again to fix the damage that was caused the first time. 

Apparently the first marina we were in at Lefkada drilled 32 nails into the hull of the boat to install a rubber boot over the sail drives. Nails should never be drilled into the hull, the cover should have been glued on.  This allowed seawater to enter through the holes and into our boat so the bilge pump was on for 2 days pumping water out of the boat until we reached a marina with a lift system.

On the bright side The Corinth Canal was a delightful experience, the narrow canal that is 4 miles long and only 21m wide so with our 14m beam we had only 3.5m on either side!  We were lucky to enter it as soon as we arrived as you could normally wait anything between 1 to 3 hours to get through since permission is granted to one vessel at a time because of its narrowness.  This canal which was built in the 1893 saves vessels from going all the way around the south of the island of Kefalonia, a saving of 180NM!