Greek Easter and beyond....

I've been very very lax in keeping up with the blog, days and whole weeks seem to pass me by in a blink. I finished the last entry with the Carnival that signifies the beginning of 'no meat' for a month leading up to Easter. Since then we've been busy working on Summertime refit with a few social and light drinking evenings out just to keep our hand in for the coming Easter festivities :-).

Just before the Easter weekend I had a disaster, I crashed and burned, I came off my push bike. I went over a little hump back bridge in the marina that I hadn't been over before and it didn't have hardly any footpath at the other side, just bushes. By the time I realised I was in trouble it was tooooo late!! I tried to turn quickly with my front brakes on instead of the back and with a downhill motion way too fast, I went arse over tit over the handle bars. Got a puncture in one leg and grazed the other knee and hand and jarred my back. My bottom lip came out in a little tremble as I picked myself up and walked delicately to the van for my Mark to fix my chain. You should have seesn my bruises, they were massive and technicolour!!

Easter weekend ....

.... on the island is another big celebration. On Easter eve they all pile out of Church singing ready for celebraions in the town square, again with lots of noise and ending with fireworks. Now big, up in the sky fireworks, but colourful very load fireworks with the noice bouncing off the nearby walls and nearly deafening everyone. Motto here seems to be 'the more noise the better the enjoyment'. On the Sunday after Church everyone celebrates the end of 'no Clean Month (no meat) with meat, meat and more meat on barbeques and spit roasts, no doubt culminating in lots of constipation.

Easter Sunday, one of the guys that lives here put on a spit roast, cooking 2 lambs and a pig. Everyone takes something to go with them and booze and generally has a knees up for the afternoon and evening.

Before

and

after

Weather wise is was perfect, nearly a 100 people enjoyed free flowing booze all afternoon and the meat off the spits was gorgeous, it was a perfect afternoon.

More piccies of the lamb roast here

Wycherley's go racing!!

Easter Monday was the race from Nikiana down to Tyglia (a small island at the top of Meganissi), then across to Paleros on the Greek mainland. Mark must have changed his mind as to weather we were going to race 50 times in the preceeding 24 hours!! On the morning he said 'we'll go down to the start and just follow them round', yea right!! Can you imagine him FOLLOWING anyone?? Anyway we went down to the start line, listened to the racr briefing, watched all the boats getting sails up and crewed warmed up, most were suffering sever hangovers from the day before, and 10 minutes from the start gun, Mark decides we're racing. Well we didn't get a good start as you can imagine, we were on the wrong tack for starters, and crossed the line about 8th out of the 12 cruisers starting. Once we got going though and Mark got the bit between his teeth, me on the helm, him triming we had caught up and passed all but the lead boat by the first tack (about 40 mins after the start). We suffered real light winds for the next hour trying to catch the lead boat. That boat had been first on the water for the last 2 years running. We were luckier with the wind than they were for the next hour and put in 2 less tacks than they did but even so they were probably a mile in front of us. As the wind picked up with the aid of a thunder and lightning storm coming across the hills into the Meganissi channel, we flew down there, sailing our house like a dinghy, only letting the minimum of power off when we really had to - the first time in months we'd had the boat really flying. We rounded the island mark going like a bat out of hell!! Downwind leg now all the way to Peleros - get the Spinnaker out - the wind died again. Next hour we had to sit through the odd tiny gust until Mark was nearly at screaming point. Just when I thought he would throw in the towel, the wind picked up, the Spinnaker filled and we were away. By now we were reeling in the lead boat again but very slowly and really had no chance of catching them before the finish line, now we just wanted to finish as close as possible to them and we did that in style - flying across the finish line with Spinnaker up just 10 minutes behind them. What made Marks day was a comment from the racer organiser of 'I've never seen a 390 going so fast across a finish line - it was fantastic'.

Moored up at Paleros after the race

The evening is spent in lively company in the only curry resturant for miles and miles. We found to our excitement that after coming 2nd on the water we were also 3rd on corrected time, we were well pleased with the performance of our 'home'. Some more wine to celebrate please!!

Crystal Tea Light holder for 3rd prize.