As I said in my last blog, we altered our journey plans back to the UK to include a delivery trip to Venice on a 46@ Grand Soleil. What I haven't told you is that the boat needed some urgent repairs before it was sailable, just small things like the Autopilot!!! Most of the instruments weren't working so Mark repaired what we considered to be the most necessary - like the Autopilot!!!, GPS, small engine problems (water pump exploded) and on an on. By the time we did set sail we still didn't have any wind info apart from the Windex on the top of the mast which wasn't reflective so can't be seen at night unless a torch is shined up to it, and depth which was only available at the chart table.
Anyway we set sail 4 days later than we were supposed to due to waiting for parts for the engine water pump.
After a short sea trial in Lefkas we thought this boat would be fast and give us an exciting sail. We were looking forward to a quick trip. Oh how wrong we were......
The first leg of the journey was to Gouvia Marina on Corfu - call it a bit of a shake down. We got out of the north end of Lefkas and started to pull out the mast furled mainsail - it was jammed. That took us half an hour to free and get going. The rest of the day went without any problems. Arrived at Gouvia at 9.30ish and got moored up. First part of the journey undertaken - no problems.
Next morning, fuelled up again and off we go. Out of Gouvia, Mainsail up, pull the Genoa out and it tore right across where the UV strip should be (note 'should be' - it didn't have one) at the height of the top spreader. Luckily there was another foresail onboard, so we changed that and got underway. Morning was fine, building wind, lovely sailing, this is what we were looking forward to. By mid afternoon we had well in excess of 30 knots of wind (for the non sailors among you that's a lot!) and confused short seas - basically a less than pleasant sail for lots of hours. It was during this period we realised how many more problems this boat had - we knew it had had a keel repair from an old crunch, the mast had been taken off during the repair and hadn't been put back on properly or tensioned correctly and the rest of the repair hadn't been carried out very well. The result was that every wave we slammed down on shook the rig right down to its boots with an alarming judder and very loud sounds of complaint. Coupled with that, water was pouring in through the deck around the mast and most of the window leaked to some degree. We held our breadth every time it happened. We did a lot of slamming over the next 2 days. There were times I thought the whole rig would come down around our ears. We also had a Genoa sheet explode just as dusk was falling on the 2nd evening, so a small fight in high winds ensued with that to end over end the sheets. We were motor sailing to try and keep any kind of northerly course, even then we were forced more west than we wanted to go. Add to that we were in a busy shipping area and as always there's lots of traffic at night. Our track over the water looked like a snail on LSD. Are we having fun yet?????
Day three, we're beginning to get a little tired when the weather calmed down and we were back on course sailing in the right direction. Now the weather was a little calmer I started cleaning the boat down below, we had considerable amount of salt on the inside due to the leaking mast and windows. Day four, calm and pleasant sailing during the day, real busy traffic during the night, however that old friend 'fear' keeps you awake and alert at night. Those big ferries look 'REAL' big close up at night.
Day five and six, no wind. We had to motor for the last 36 hours of the journey on seas of glass, the forecast was for the wind to go round to the south which would have been brilliant, unfortunately it didn't happen. Luckily we took on extra fuel for just such an event.
Well, we'd had it all on this short journey, we thought it would take us four days from Corfu and it took and extra 24 hours exactly to get into Albarella Marina, just south of Venice. This poor boat needs some serious TLC and ti won't be cheap. But that's not our problem; we sat with a beer giving thanks that this bag of spanners had actually made.
Would we take on another delivery - another boat, another destination - a definite maybe!!
Michael and Eve came up the next week and stayed a night, the next day was lovely and sunny and we took Lewie for a walk up to the viaduct and got some very different piccies of it this year - have a look here.
