37:07.738N 26:51.318E

Muskrat
Chris and Alison
Tue 5 Apr 2022 19:14
Launch day arrived (31st March) nice and sunny with not much wind so at 1130am we were gently lowered into the Mediterranean again. As there were no other yachts going in the marinos allowed us to go outside the marina to have a practice going astern and to run the engine for a while. The going astern practice went better than expected, the trick is to come to a complete stop, put the engine in reverse in tick-over only until she starts to go backwards then to engage helm very gently, once going backwards we appear to have steerage. All well and good in the middle of a bay but in the confines of a marina this would be very difficult, so more practice needed. The marinos helped us into our berth and we were soon tied up again in an almost empty marina.

The next few days the wind blew up again gusting in excess of 40+ knots, but we have a lot of jobs to do so that kept us busy. We had not planned to stay too long once in the water but we are still waiting for our new dinghy that was ordered over the winter months. Apparently it is with the customs so who knows how long it will take (grrrrrr Brexit).

We managed to get our boat papers back in one day this time, a slight miracle considering how long it took us to hand them in when we arrived. However the preverbal question of the transit log came up again (grrrr Brexit) and we were asked why we didn’t have one by the Port Police. We explained that we visited customs on our arrival and were told that we didn’t need one until we had left Greece and then on our return we would need to get one. A long phone call to the customs officer and the Policeman finally agreed that this was correct. He did ask us to let them know when we were leaving Leros, no sure why we have to do this but we will do as we are told.

So we just have to wait now for our new dinghy to be released from customs. We will carry on with the jobs list in the mean time.