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.

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