Morning in Corfu town. Not a cloud in the sky as usual.

Today was an end of season race, so we took Knight Odyssey and Knight Star around to the marina where we moored up Knight Odyssey and dropped off the elements of the crew that didn’t want to race before piling everybody else onto Knight Star.
We spent the rest of the morning practicing tacking and hoisting and dropping sails, until we decided that was far too serious and had lunch.

After not such a good start just as the wind died we made our way up through the fleet. The wind did it’s usual trick of dying and then coming back from a different direction several times but with a crew of 7 we had enough people to setup the boat each time. We had a near disaster when the gas ran out so we couldn’t make any more tea…. but we had spare cold beer and eventually we made it to the finish. Here is the finish line. Because of the handicap system we would not know how we had done until later…..

There is a massive party at the end of the day and a prizegiving, and we were very pleased to find we had come second of the large flotilla boats. We even beat the owner of the company who came third (remember the massive yacht from a couple of day ago).

Our prize was a bottle of wine and a shirt..

Celebrations continued quite late so this blog post is a bit later than normal.

Another fine weeks sailing rounded off in style.

Once again the morning revealed the correct yacht count. And some rather ominous mist suggesting a lack of wind.

The owner of the holiday company was in the same port sailing with some friends of his. They decided to take some pictures and went to some rather extreme lengths to get a good angle. note the man up the mast. …

Sadly wind eluded us for much of the day so we spent nearly 3 hours anchored up snorkelling which was great fun.
Tonight we are anchored at Corfu town… an impressive place.

We are moorwd at the foot of that massive citadel. Here you can see all the boats as seen from the yacht club bar.

Tomorrow we’ll have a go at the end of season race.

We woke to find that we still had the same number of boats in the bay, and that they had all swung around on their anchors to face the other way as the wind had changed, and they had done this without hitting each other. This of course was the plan, but it is always nice when it works.

A great morning sailing up from Paxos headed for a small port Petriti at the southern end of Corfu. The wind was in a nice direction at first so we got the cruising chutes out again. Here is Knight Odyssey.

The promised stronger wind in the afternoon never showed up and we still had a fair distance to go so once again we motored the last bit. This is not nearly as bad as it sounds, as the engine chills the beer and heats the shower water…. there were a lot of yachts trying the share not enough quay so we were happy to anchor off again….

Tonight there is a Halloween party with a water melon carving competition.  We decided that a scary face was just too predictable, so here is our entry.

Now sailing itself has a few dangers…. but you would think going to get the bread in morning would be safe enough wouldn’t you? Well only if you look where you are going….

On the way back we passed a fish shop which was just having a delivery.

The cats clearly know the schedule and were waiting for the scraps to be thrown out.
So anyway… sailing. … there was a nice breeze in the morning so we sailed down to emerald bay, a destination we had failed to reach last year. You can see how it gets its name.

A great place to snorkel, we were on our own when we arrived but there were 22 yachts there when we left! One girl managed to get stung by a Jellyfish, I was wondering if they stung while I was photographing them….. Anyway, loads of fish as you can see

Tonight we are moored in the bay at Lakka. We arrived here after motoring up the west coast of Paxos… no wind at all this afternoon. But this allowed us to look at the cliffs and caves… We are actually anchored in the bay so had to take the dinghy over to the town key for dinner. A relatively hazardous trip in the dark… but there were no stray chainsaws and we survived….

After a quick trip to the supermarket with the parrot (I was dissappointed to learn it did not say “buy one get one free” in greek). We headed around the corner to refuge bay. There was no wind forecast for the morning so we planned to hang out here and snorkel.. Below you can see a load of fish taking a surprising interest in Knight Odyssey’s and Knight Star’s keels….

We had about 15 miles to do to Gaios on Paxos. We motored for an hour while we had lunch and then the wind picked up as Paxos appeared ahead out of the mist. Off with the engine and up with the sails and an afternoon fiddling with bits of rope trying to go 2.8 knots instead of 2.7 ensued. The wind direction came around in our favour and we hoisted the cruising chute in place of the genoa. More fiddling with rope and pulling of beards got us 2.9 knots….

Rather difficult to photograph your own sails…….

Gaios is a great place. On the map above we are the red triangle. Tucked in right behind the islands. All the crews on our flotilla went to eat together this evening. The season is almost over so most of the items on the menu were off, and we drank them out of local beer… but they still had Heiniken, so disaster was avoided.

Here we are moored up in Sivota Mourtos. As you can see the boats look a bit like laundries festooned with wet swimming gear. The problem is that there has been so much dew overnight that it is wetter than when we hung it out last night….. Never mind…. forecast is 28 degrees and sunny.

This week we are planning to go down to Paxos, which is great because it gives us a second crack at Emerald Bay….. So today we needed to head 20 miles down to Sivota Mortos.. it is opposite the southern end of Corfu in this shot of the chart… and we started top left.

The wind was not in a very helpful direction so we motored for nearly 4 hours, but we did get the boat sailing really nicely at about 4 knots for a couple of hours….

we wanted to get in time for a swim so we motored the last bit, and anchored off the northern end of Sivota Island, next to Knight Star’s sister ship Knight Odyssey, out boat last year but this time being sailed by our friends……

Just need to figure out how to get out from amongst all these other moored yachts in Gouvia Marina.

Sunday’s BBC Weather forecast for Corfu Airport: Sunny. Max 22°C, min 15°C. Wind 4 mph N. http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/6299495

We’re off again, this time we are just going to be sailing in a big circle back to where we start from. Corfu’s Gouvia marina (that’s where we left the boat at the end of the last trip). We have some friends coming in an identical yacht this time as well.