We left you in May, after we’d returned Barberry to her lonely (and very hot) existence on a stand in the yard at Cleopatra Marina. Much happened since then, including a house move a couple of weeks after we got home, and then (9 days later) the wedding of our beautiful eldest daughter, Katrina, to Peter. With heavy rain forecast, we were braced for umbrellas and rain macs over our posh togs, but for that one day, the sun shone on us all.
After the wedding, we ran our other daughter, Laura, to Dublin for her epic round the world trip, returning to her home in Canada via conference in Taiwan at which she was an invited speaker. Flying high in more ways than one (she’s an astrophysicist!). Once the dust had settled, we knuckled down to unpack from the house move, cleaned the rental house ready to hand the keys back, and found a safe spot for our other little boat, Clàr Innis, in Groomsport Harbour. We’re loving the new house, just a stone’s throw from the beach.
Before we came away, Fraser’s sister, Kirsty, gave us a wonderful house-warming present. Our niece, Clara Matchett, is a talented young artist and Kirsty had commissioned her to paint Barberry on her journey through the French Inland waterways. This is a gift we will treasure for ever.
We had been counting the days until we could head back to the warmth of Greece and our beautiful Barberry. At last the day came. We’d organised our cat sitter, house sitters, and a lift to the airport from our son, Patrick, at silly o’clock in the morning, and finally we were on our way with two very enormous bags and two heavy rucksacks. We had flight delays the whole way, so it was after midnight by the time we crawled to bed in one of the lovely apartments at Cleopatra Marina and slept like the dead. As soon as we stepped outside the airport, we breathed in the scents of Greece: hot, dry vegetation that feels as if it’s from a different planet to the damp, squidgyness of Northern Ireland. Bliss!
The next morning, Sunday, we headed straight to Barberry to check she was all right. Of course she was. Cleopatra Marina would have contacted us if there’d been a problem, and she was as good as when we’d left her apart from a layer of red Sahara dust all over her hull and deck.
There’s always a long list of jobs to do, getting the boat ready for launch, and we had 1.5 days in which to complete the tasks. It’s hard to imagine, while shivering in Northern Ireland, how difficult it is to work in the heat of a Greek summer. Everything takes longer, and we both had to remind each other to keep sipping water to fend off sunstroke and heat exhaustion.
We had arranged to meet our agent, Sofia Gravani from All About Yachts at 7.30 pm in the marina restaurant. We don’t really need to use an agent in Greece and many people don’t, but we feel that the small expense is worth every penny as she does all the paperwork for us — and the Greeks really love their paperwork. She has a good relationship with the port police and customs and she delivers our Cruising Tax receipt, our Transit Log, etc to our boat. If nothing else, it saves us a long, hot walk and several long queues only to find that no English is spoken (and why should they speak English; this is their country, and we should be learning to speak Greek a bit faster than we have so far!)
Working as a team, we began by hosing and brushing all the Sahara dust from Barberry, otherwise we’d be treading it all down below on the soles of our shoes. Fraser grumpily warned me not to soak him with the hose while he brushed, not realising that I had the water pointed at myself, basking in the cool flow. It took him a while to realise the benefits of being sopping wet in this heat, but he did catch on eventually!
We finished the pre-launch essentials in plenty of time on Monday morning, then lugged our heavy bags across to her and stowed all the bits and pieces we need to be comfortable for the next two months. In this heat, neither of us is usually hungry at lunchtime so we just eat a piece of fruit or a bread roll (Fraser only — it’s too dry for me). Just as I licked the last peach juice from my fingers, we got a phone call from the yard staff to ask if we could be ready to launch a bit earlier. Cue a stately canter back to the boat to find that they’d already started dismantling her cradle. We were told (very politely) that we weren’t needed, so we headed back to the sea front to await Barberry’s arrival.
As soon as she was in the water, and Fraser had checked for leaky through hull fittings (there weren’t any, so all good), they let go of our lines and we motored out of the marina, covering the short distance to Cleopatra’s sister marina in Preveza
I’ll leave you with an image of my legs, with rivers of sweat running down them. Surely to goodness I’ve got to lose some weight in this heat, even if just via dehydration! Fraser will take over next time to show how a simple boat job can turn bad as he fits a new fuel filter system to Barberry’s engine. He got a lot sweatier than me during that episode!