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.

The cloud and snow returned today. This is probably the best snow we have seen in 25 years of skiing, but some of the worst weather as well. Having said that, in 25 years we have never had a single day when we couldn’t ski, which I suspect is pretty good going.

Anyway we skied over to La Tania. These place names will make no sense to most people, so here, belatedly is a map.

You can get the full map at http://ski-area.meribel.net/fileadmin/RM/Plan_des_pistes/plan_3vallees.pdf

La Tania was built as a new resort when the winter Olympics was in France back in 1992. The lift system does not seem to have been touched since then, which is slightly crazy. It is set up for families but only connected to the rest of the ski area by quite a tricky run, one more lift and it would be transformed. By contrast St Martin, a similar small satellite resort in the other valley has had its lifts completely replaced over the same period.

For the last run of the day we came back to our own valley and visited the “Moon Park”. Each of the resorts now has its own “park”, an area of snow shaped by the grooming machines into “whoops” jumps and all kinds of other things I don’t known the right terms for. Certain of the more suicidal members of the party like these places….  A new feature for this year is a system where you swipe your electronic lift pass at the start, then it videos you as you go down (one for clear days this) and then sends the video to your mobile so you can bore your mates to death with it that evening. We couldn’t quite be bothered to stand in the freezing cold trying to figure out the instructions so here is our own video. These bumps (sorry Whoops) are sooo much bigger than they look in this.

http://youtu.be/HU-2WUUqQUE&rel=0

This blog post was delayed by the author going down with the bug that has troubled the other members of the party this week, and therefore spending the evening running a temperature, moaning, and generally lying about on the sofa getting in the way whilst everybody else packed. Normal service will be resumed just as soon as we figure out what normal is…. Oh and there was a problem with the sledging video that has now been fixed, so if you are interested go back to yesterdays post and you should now see all of it. It turns out that uploading HD videos over the resort WiFi is a bit flaky…. funny that.

There is of course no such thing as a bad day’s skiing, just some where you can’t see as well as others, and some where you feel a bit secondhand at the end. So we will sign off with some skiing up high in the sunshine.

http://youtu.be/o8CjsILg-ws&rel=0

Thanks for reading

Today we skied over to Val Thorens, although we learned from a couple of teenagers on a chair lift yesterday that it is not cool to call it Val Thorens, it is now known as “VT”… in fact even uncool  may no longer be the right thing to say… oh what eves

Anyway, Val Thorens was once and (maybe still is) the highest ski resort in Europe, giving it perfect snow conditions, but limited architectural merit. As well as the great skiing the other reason to ski over there is the waffles. This is a cafe we discovered what must be very nearly 20 years ago, serving freshly cooked waffles, and here it still is.

It occurs to me that this is truly remarkable. Most of the busy lifts in the 3 valleys have been upgraded since we first came here, anything that was slow and had queues has been replaced by state of the art 6 man express chairs, the last of the old gondolas of any significance will go this summer. We are not talking trivial changes here, these lifts cost 5 to 10 mllion Euro a go. Skiing as a sport has changed hugely in that time, but the cafes and restaurants up on the mountains have hardly changed, there are a few new ones, and this one in particular has been extended, but most of the ones we knew are still there… with the same menus! Why would that be?

Anyway, back to the waffles. As you can see a healthy lunch with no UK calories and 4 portions of fresh fruit…..

Val Thorens has more than its fair share of the latest trends, it seems that every bar and cafe now has to have music, but bizarrely enough this one had a band playing “Hotel California” and similar vintage. Oh it has a sushi bar as well.

Back to the quasi normal world of Meribel there was floodlit sledging organized this evening. Normally we are here in school holidays but this year our half term does not line up with French (or most of the UK for that matter) holidays and so it is slightly quieter than previous year. This also means there are slightly less evening activities laid on, but the sledging has to be done….

This year they were lending out “snake sledges” which are individual plastic tray sledges clipped together with a hinged joint, so two or more people try and steer it down the slope. Luckily the helmet cam was on hand….

http://youtu.be/ZxLux2GIh_Y&rel=0

Anyway, another fun day…..

last day skiing tomorrow…..

This is more like it.

Sunshine with the odd cloud wandering around. After several days of snow there is a lot of fresh powder easily accessible at the sides of the pistes, and we even found a few sections that were completely untouched to ski in. This kind of snow requires a completely different technique, which I doubt I will ever master, but I can at least embarrass my children by trying.

We skied mainly in the Belleville valley above Les Menuires and St Martin de Belleville, the sunshine on the tops, usually above any clouds was great.  Mainly for Richard’s benefit here is an HD video of Jerusalem – top to bottom in 5 minutes at a maximum speed of 30.8 mph (according to GPS). Have I mentioned the sunshine?

http://youtu.be/-NuRPiRcGIY&rel=0

If you are reading this on Wednesday evening it might not have finished uploading… internet connectivity is not stunning here.

All in all a fine day’s skiing

Our apartment is privately owned, the local agency we rent it from describes it using some agency speak that means “could do with a bit of a refurb” however it has the overwhelming advantage of location. You could ski into the locker room (stopping and opening the door is very much recommended), and within about 100m we have a ski hire shop (of the more helpful variety), a brilliant restaurant that also does takeaway pizza, and a supermarket. This does rotisserie chickens, a brilliant concept if you can a) think ahead enough to order one and b) speak French. Of course I can do neither of these things… but someone in the party can, so this evening we ordered one of these instead of eating out. I resisted the temptation to photograph it…