38:10.71 20:29.37E

Wednesday 13th August

The day started hot and pretty much breathless, so we motored for most of the day, but as we had planned to arrive at Argostoli in daylight on Thursday morning and we were ahead of schedule thanks to the first 6 hours sailing last night, we kept the revs down and slid along at around 6.50 knots. Very little to see or report throughout the day as we came across just the one yacht and virtually no shipping at all. The good news (so to speak) was that we had acquired a copy of the Sunday Times on Tuesday morning, so we had plenty of reading.

At 5.00pm the wind started to pick up and before long we were able to cut the engine and were slipping along at 5 knots in just 8 to 9 knots of breeze.

At around 5.30pm, in preparation for the night watch system, we sat down to enjoy some drinks and nibbles (non-alcoholic sadly) and to toast the nearing of the end of the first stage of our travels, namely arriving in Greek waters. As we finished these and Sarah was about to gear herself up into cooking supper (having already prepared supper as it gets dark fairly suddenly at 8.30 and we need to maintain our night vision) ........the fishing rod tip bent over and the reel started whining, heralding our second catch! Slightly trickier landing a fish when the boat is sailing along and of course as luck would have it, the wind was freshening all the time and so our speed kept increasing as well!

Fortunately this time we had managed to catch the perfect sized tuna (3kgs) as Sarah was able to cut this up into 12 lovely steaks (see photos at www.rhbell.com ) without any wastage.

I think it is only right at this stage to perhaps point out that catching and landing the fish is definitely the easy bit. Gutting, bleeding and cutting it up are a far harder task, without the added excitement of trying to do this on a moving deck under sail. Lovely to be able to catch and eat fresh fish as you go along and it is perhaps more than a little ungrateful to wish that we could perhaps catch a different species on our next attempt, but all the same...... And yes, previous supper had to be abandoned in favour of very fresh produce!

The next irony of the day came as darkness fell and we cleared away the excellent meal that had only been swimming behind us just 1.5 hours ago:  the wind speed increased up to a perfect 15 + knots on the beam and we were whizzing along in near perfect conditions. We were getting ahead of the schedule, which is less important if you are heading for a friendly port that you know well, but our destination was unknown to us and generally trying to enter Mediterranean harbours after dark is a very risky business. The two alternatives were to race on and then try to find an anchorage in the dark on the slightly inhospitable and unlit coast of Cephalonia, or slow down! We opted at midnight to slow the boat down, which involved furling the genoa up (a lot) and putting a reef in the main.

Thursday 14^th August

This philosophy helped a bit, but the wind was still increasing and the distance to Argostoli was shortening too rapidly, so bizarrely by the end of the night as the wind finally eased, we were sailing in 15 knots of breeze with just a scrap of head sail and the equivalent of 3 reefs in the main, and still making 4 – 5 knots!

The day dawned with Cephalonia looming large in front of us and naturally there was a dramatic increase in the amount of ships crossing our path. We sailed into the mouth of the bay that leads to Argostoli and dropped the sails and motored slowly into the small harbour looking for the customs quay were we had to first tie up and report into Greece. Fortunately there was a large space which had just been vacated by two Italian motor cruisers so we were able to carry out our first stern-to mooring using the bow anchor. Normally this is not the hardest thing to do, but when there are only two of you and at least three separate jobs, as well as the inevitable crosswind, it has the potential to be exciting. (The divorce courts are full of these cases I am sure!) The good news is that our newly modified anchor remote switch on the steering pedestal worked a treat and one of the English crew from a huge super yacht came along the quay to save Sarah from having to make a rather dodgy leap of faith onto the land. Sadly he had absolutely no idea at all as to what to do with the rope once he had caught it, so Sarah diplomatically watched him wrap it round and round a bollard and thanked him for at least trying.

Now we had the bit that I had perhaps been looking forward to the least since we left the UK. To sail into Greece is to enter a nightmare of red tape and bureaucracy according to the pilot books and legend. I have vivid and unhappy memories of dealings with the dreaded Port Police from our days in the flotilla business back in 1980 and the corruption...

Well if any of this is still true, it certainly is not true of the officials in Argostoli. We were dealt with immediately, made to feel welcome and finally rather guilty when the officer dealing with our case apologised at the end of a long session of filling in forms (most of which he appeared never to have seen before and had to keep asking his boss for help) for speaking such poor English.

Nothing was too much trouble and they carefully explained all the (complex) rules that apply in Greece and what we needed to do. It seems that not too many boats choose to start their cruises through Greece down here so we were made to feel a little special.

As a side issue, the question of paperwork has been a lot less onerous as we have travelled down from England than we were perhaps given to expect. The Portuguese and Spanish marinas handle all the paperwork for you and although there are usually forms to be filled in at every overnight stop, frequently the officials at the port will do this for you as they have to enter it onto a computer anyway. Sicily was a little different and we have been told since that the Italians will go to quite long lengths to avoid filling in or dealing with any of the required paperwork! The 90 ft motor cruiser Norseman, that were moored next to us in Trapani, had to demand various forms were signed and stamped on their arrival from Tunisia as they needed  evidence of their arrival for tax purposes. The officials were very unhappy at having to do this. Our experience in Sicily was that the marinas or boatyards just photocopied key documents and chucked them in a large and untidy pile on the off chance that one day they would have to show them to somebody.

So, having done the formal paperwork, we now had to move Serafina off the customs quay and find a space on the busy town wall. Again this required us to moor stern-to using the anchor and apart from a nervous moment or two when I confused ‘up’ with ‘down’ on my unmarked shiny new switch, we reversed rather stylishly (!) into a large space where our lines were taken by the English owner of the yacht alongside us. We tidied up and went for a coffee and exploratory stroll around the town.

Argostoli is the main town on the island of Cephalonia and we quickly came to realise that we were back in the land of British tourists. That is not a slur, but just an observation that suddenly signs are in English and everyone speaks English. Sarah has been trying to buy some cotton to repair some items since we left Spain and here she finds just the shop she has hunted for so far and wide. She tried in vain to demonstrate what she wanted (Sicilians in particular have no use for learning English so signs works well!) until the elderly lady running the shop said, “ ah, cotton.” The internet cafe is happy to allow us to use our laptop on their system for as long as we want and finally during this very short stroll, I found the two shops that I have spent hours in Trapani, Marsala, Sciacca and Siracusa looking for, side by side just 150 metres from the boat!

So here we are finally in Greece as we  planned all those years ago. Serafina has cruised just under 5,000 miles since we picked her up in Sweden in July 2007 and now we have time to go and visit all our old haunts and look up a few old friends in the Ionian Islands. Act Two starts here......