What’s Going On…?

Aren’t you dieing to know?!?!

Cristal blue and turquoise waters, perfect sailing conditions, calm anchorages, dolphins, fish and plenty of voluptuous maidens and mermaids feeding me grapes and giving me foot massages. Ahhhh… the life!

Are you high or just stupid?! Wake up people, this is Greece! The land of dreams…. where you have to be asleep to believe it.

Not that it’s better anywhere else. At least the sea IS blue. Time to get into an ATM line to withdraw my 60euro daily max! If you don’t know what I’m talking about…. I applaud you!

OK… time to let you know! If you recall from my previous post I was making a tube cover for my “good” dinghy. Since most afternoons after work I go down to Zoot Allures, the dang thing was inflated in my living room for 3 weeks. Well… I finished it, deflated it and got my living room back.

Lets get this post a bit more interesting. I’ve been hanging out alot with my Dutch friends Ulbe and Carla. There was a beautiful sailing boat anchored out in the bay and I was certain it was a Tayana…. my dream boat. We buzzed out to check it out and got invited aboard by a lovely couple Jan and Katleen. Well, this boat was in perfect condition. I mean perfect… I’ve never experience anything like it before. And guess what. It wasn’t a Tayana. It was a Hans Christian!!!! which is my other dream boat I’ve completely stopped dreaming about for obvious reasons. Well as you can imagine, I was completely gaga so I having got much else to talk about. At least I took a few pics.

Another interesting thing going on was me going up another mast. This time it was for a friend Theodor and his Hunter 36 to replace his wind meter thingie (I’m a bit in demand due to my lack of weight). But this mast is 15meters high! There is a bit of a story of me being up there for and hour switching halyards yada yada… yikes… but the view was beautiful and Zoot Allures looked sweet anchored next door.

I sent one of these pics to Mom…. she wasn’t pleased.

And now for the boring stuff

Other than that, I’ve been taking care of a few issues which have been a total pain in the… where the sun don’t shine. The raw water pump was leaking. I pulled it and had Kostas repaired it. Put it back in and it leaked more. Pulled it again and used seal glue so now it wont leak. But it wouldn’t pump. Probably a cheep soft impeller. Got a good expensive impeller but the same prob. Pulled the pump and apparently the shaft was too far out so the coupler wasn’t “coupling”. Taped the shaft further in and it’s working fine now and the conclusion is that I got to find a new pump for next year. Did I mention that it takes a painful half an hour to remove the 4 pump screws and just as long to put it back in. Probably not. I’m trying to “forgetaboutit”!! Also with all this pump trouble shooting there was a smell. My starter motor was smoking. Kostas wanted to cry when he saw that. It took him one hour to remove it and 3 hours to re-install after having it repaired in Piraeus. Did I mention that the f@#$er weighs over 25 kilos? Did I mention that to remove it, you have to first remove the upside-down oil filter and the filter’s base from the engine. Did I mention how much I love a nice clean white engine bilge?

I stick to trying to pull some money from our closed banks!

Stay tuned… and stop watching the news!

Capt Pete

ps… my vacation starts on Friday…WhaaaaHoooooo! The plans… I’m gonna take it a bit easier this year. There are plenty of lovely “Cristal blue and turquoise waters” in my back yard which are alot more peaceful that the peak season Aegean Sea full of charter boats loaded with European “superiorists”!