Schizophrenia… sort of.

First off, I’d like to say…

Now isn’t that a nice song! I’ve been wanting to use it for a post for a while now. It wraps up the weekend sail. Schizophrenia kicks in driving back to Athens to go to work Monday morning. Last week was sucky workwize… Rachmaninoff editing plus a dumbass Visa conference about cyber-crime blah blah. Back to Ol’ Zoot!

During last week, I got some new screws for the starter motor. But it has been installed in an odd way, long story short, only one bolt is holding it.

Weekend… The forecast is beautiful. Light northerly’s, clear skies, mild temps… perfect. My neighbor Alex had head out to Petalious Island on Friday night and I’ll be damned if I don’t sail out as well. As for company, Ada was the only one who could come, which is a great thing.

Set sail at noon. The wind was from…. of course… dead on to Petalious. Of course, we sailed off course, until we realized we’d miss a good afternoon swim so, alas, we motorsailed half the way. All was good. Zoot Allures and Ada had their first encounter with dolphins! Ada was ecstatic, she had never seen one so close. There were 3 of them playing around making little dolphin sounds and were off on there way after a few minutes.

On arriving, first course of business and beautiful swim, check out the anchor and to greet our neighbors. Then food. We hadn’t brought any thing with us but I had enough stock to figure something out. Lentils with onion, garlic, tomato past and ginger and rusks, olive oil etc. I gotta fix my galley.  Holding on to a pot over a camping gas thing in the swell for over half an hour get s a bit dull. We also opted to fish. For bait, we dinghy’ed out to the rocks to get some petalides shell snails. We encountered a rather large crab that Ada wanted me to stab with the knife but we felt sorry for the beautiful creature and messed with him until he started snapping at us. Naturally we had no camera. Back on ol’ Zoot, I fished for 5 minutes and got bored so Ada took over and caught a Katsoula fish in 10 seconds!!! Spirits we high but after 45 min of nothing (it had gotten dark) we gave up.Katsoules don’t die quick and have a habit of biting so I tried a trick I’ve read voyagers doing and poured some raki on her. Worked like a charm! We fried her up and had a good laugh with our rations.

Sunday morning, we saw a fellow from another boat visiting Alex and then he came by us. He’s from (upper) Austria and has voyaged down the Dune River and the Med. He loved Zoot Allures, said she a boat for a life time and invited us for coffee. The fun part was that he was rowing with one oar, and would work it like a yuloh in front of is dingy while standing. Quite a funny sight. His boat was 28 feet but one of the smartest sailboats I’ve seen. We exchanged emails and shall meet again.

After some lunch, we set sail at 3 to be back by 6. We were on a broad reach and still off course, of course. We had to run but there was just not enough wind to make the sails work. I tried all combinations, even wing on wing (almost killed myself when the boom swung over, no preventer, and the sheet knocked me against the winch, ouch!). I have some sort of spinnaker but no pole, gotta figure out a light wind sailing strategy. We eventually motored the last hour in. (the motor was dead the first 2 attempts starting. Ada’s reaction was “again?!?”) Running the auto pilot, we fooled around taking snapshots.We got back on schedule, caught the mooring first try and concluded a wonderful week end. Ada took off for town and I went for dinner once again to cuz G.S.

Monday morning, I cannot describe how beautiful it was. I almost cried…. probably cause I had to rap her up and go into town to…work!

I hate leaving Zoot Allures. And the weather is sooo beautiful, it’s a sin not being there.

Summer is over, Fall is here, the nights are getting chilly. New on the haulout/winter to do list is probably pulling out the Perkins. It’s access is ridiculous, it went trough 1.5 liters of oil in 8 hours run time and who knows what else is lurking. We’ll see.

But we still got a couple of months to go.

Stay tuned

Capt Pete

ps….

Everyone is trying to get to the bar
The name of the bar, the bar is called heaven
The band in heaven, they play my favourite song
Play it one more time, play it all night long
Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens
Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens
There is a party, everyone is there
Everyone will leave at exactly the same time
When this party’s over, it will start again
It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same
Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens
When this kiss is over it will start again
It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same
It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all could be so exciting, could be this much fun
Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens
Heaven, heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens

pss….. shit, I need a drink!