Grace Notes

On Friday, Greece celebrated Independence Day and the Feast of the Assumption. We had great weather, and the Nidri quay front was the centre of the local action. Panos opened the Cafe Di Paris for the season. It looks smart in its new "ice cream" pink and green colours. Needless to say, we were working on Grace. Following experiments earlier in the week, Sara covered her fridge with polyester spot filler and gel coat filler around the edge. I was wiring - I'll be happy if I never see another cable tie or crimp another connector.

We have moved on to Grace.  It is lovely to be living aboard her, as we will for the next 7 months.  We have finally unpacked after 2 weeks living out of our bags.  It feels good to be able to settle in a bit.  We currently have shore power and so have heating and everything we need for the power tools.  Grace is our workshop in the day and home in the evening. So to the jobs:- we have mounted the smart charger, but this still needs wiring up, sorted out all the anchors and anchor chain, so we are now using our new chain and Rocna , put in our two new hatches and filled in our leaking hinge on the main hatch, making us water tight, sanded all the glue off the fridge and filled in the drill holes that we did not need, installed Phil's reading light and put up the coat hooks in the saloon, mended the bathroom cabinet switch, installed a new bathroom fluorescent, put the wiring in for the solar panel, put on a new gas regulator and probably much more.  We ha...

We've been quiet for a few days, taking in what happened on Sunday afternoon. We went up the hill to Haradiatika to see the third (and most likely final) annual cart race, organised by Vlicho Yacht Club . We were supporting Laurie and Peter, who both had carts, and there were several other entries we recognised from our brief time as locals. The My Lefkada news site sponsored the event, and their video provides a good flavour of the happy start to the day. Forgive me for not uploading the many photos and videos I took. Read on to find out why. All went well until the final event of the day, the first in which the carts were racing together. Sara and I witnessed a horrific accident at the start. A "pusher" was tripped by a cart, and run over by another, resulting in a nasty head and spinal injury. At the current time, the prognosis is awful - severe paralysis would be a good outcome. We've supplied our video of the accident to the local police. In a separat...

Yesterday Grace got wet. Four boats went in yesterday: Cloud 9, Iona, Gabriella, and Grace of Lefkas. All were launched using a traditional method involving smoking, hammers, occasional shouting, and impressive skill. Kyriakos, who runs the operation, knows the dimensions of all the boats in his yard and adjusts the launch sledge by eye. Launch Day! Considering the amount of standing around, it was an exciting and exhausting day.

What could you do with three cans of green gunk, a tub of Vaseline, gaffer tape, some cling film, bin bags, cardboard, and a power drill? We insulated our fridge. Right now, it looks like a Complete Bloody Mess. Today we learned that Bavaria insulate the sides and the bottoms of the fridge boxes with similar polyurethane gunk. Who'd have thought? Of course, we'd removed the compressor and drilled a couple of holes before we discovered this. Anyway, we're now convinced that the heat mostly was escaping through the wafer-thin top of the fridge, which makes sense as there's often sunlight directly onto the dark work surface. Tomorrow, Sara will attack the gunk with a bread knife and some sandpaper and it should come up nicely.

To give you an idea of what we're up to, this is what we've done since last Thursday: Check hull fittings and rigging. Mouse all shackles. Grease the Genoa reefer and replace furling line. Replace main outhaul. Remove the additional radio battery and supply splitter (a requirement for Greek charter boats we consider not to be anywhere near worth the space it takes). Fix the chart plotter cable and deck mount the GPS aerial (several hours of soldering coax connectors). Replace the cooker top with a less rusty spare and clean up. Swap outboard bracket to other side (so the tender doesn't fill with exhaust water when we are taking it off on on) Discover battery charger has died, and use it to salvage another "dead" spare (a piece of pure Pedro genius customised its surface mount blade fuse into a neat fuse holder, saving hours). Add a mirror in the forepeak (the bracket works nicely, thanks Dad). Meanwhile, our Nisos friends have anti-fouled the hull, and Sue has ...

We arrived in Greece exactly as planned and it was really good to get here. The journey down took four days two of between 8 to 10 hours driving and the other two more of a half day. We only took one wrong turn in Germany which only took half an hour to sort out. We celebrated Phil's birthday at a lovely place that brewed its own beer in Germany. Waking up on the overnight ferry to a beautiful sunrise over some islands in the Adriatic really got us believing we were nearly here. Since we arrived we have been warmly welcomed and well looked after. We have had a glorious home cooked fish pie and been taken to a local quiz night. The boat is in the yard on slits and we are working on her everyday to get all our jobs done. The view from our new place of work is fabulous. We are hoping to be in the water soon.