35:29.947 N  012:36.321 E

27/07/10

09:00

We haven’t quite left yet.  Having looked more closely into it I have decided to go to Lampedusa, which is a sensible 162 mile run and looks to have a nice small town and more important a protected harbour we can anchor in.  By comparison Pantelleria is really small and an awkward distance, too far to day hop and not far enough to justify an overnighter.

Last night we walked up about a million steps to the old town overlooking the harbour.  It was pretty touristy so with having a really good look around we jumped in a Taxi and went to the larger town of Marsa which my ten year old pilot recommended.  It was a town full of locals with no obvious tourism as such and no real restaurants,  We had a seriously undistinguished meal is the town centre, eating near to the main highlight, a pet camel, munching away in the middle of a small square cafe area.  Demetri had a few Dinars left, and as you can’t exchange them anywhere we went back the the old town to buy a souvenir and had a much better look around and if course found several restaurants overlooking the harbour with great views and I’m certain much better food than we had in Marsa.  They also served wine and beer which was conspicuously absent in Marsa, which is fair enough as of course their culture precludes alcohol.  Anyway apart from being amused by the camel I regretted not staying in the old town.  A lot of it looked remarkably like Greece.

11:00

We escaped at 11:00 which caused a bit of confusion as we hadn’t realized the local time was one hour earlier then we thought.  Shortly after checking in yesterday a Customs man followed me back to the boat.  I asked him what he needed and he said he just wanted to see us.  What he actually wanted was a bottle of Whisky. Steve told him the only Whisky on board was a special gift for my wife and in the end  I fobbed him off with a bottle of Pimm’s No 1 (sorry Graham).  This morning after I finished clearing out, the Chief and his number one came with me to the boat and I thought we were going to have a repeat of the entry fiasco, but they didn’t care about examining our manifest which listed every bit of electronics, computers and cameras etc on the boat.   The did want to be sure we weren’t smuggling out any locals—fair enough – but what they really wanted was a “gift.”  They didn’t want booze and in the end I parted with a 10 pound note after the chief suggested “jokingly” that 20 Euros per person would be appropriate.  He first wanted to know how much local currency we had left as he obviously had his greedy eyes on that and was disappointed when I told him we’d gone to a lot of trouble to spend whatever we had as we knew we couldn’t export it. His sidekick was very happy with the 10 quid and we left the dock almost before they got off the boat.

16:00

Had a wonderful sail the first four hours  forereaching at 8-9 knots in blue water covered by bluer sky.  We’ve just put the pole up and the speed in down but it’s still extremely pleasant.  I don’t think it gets any better than this.  We’ve got 10 miles or so to go before we need to gybe, maybe it will be spinnaker time.

22:00

In the end we didn’t gybe as we could more or less make course slowly and the wind was diminishing..

Well we had a really really nice sail but the wind plummeted  from 17 to 7 knots from dead behind which alas is of little use for us. The forecast suggests it will stay that way for the rest of the night so reluctantly I have just turned in the other means of propulsion.

It could be that the wonderful wind we’ve has the last few days has finished for now and we will be doing a lot of motoring over the  next 703 miles between here  and Spetses.  Ugh!

28/07/10

06:00

Quiet night motoring.  Steve had to dodge a few fishing boats on his watch. This morning’s dawn was remarkably similar to last night‘s sunset which in my experience is extremely rare.

10:00