We had one more night left at Abelaki and then our plan was to go around the corner to Karnagio to meet friends that we last saw on the French canals in 2023. Helen and Steve are more inland waterways ‘canalers’ than sailors, but they were coincidently crewing on their friends’ sailing boat in the Ionion at the same time as us.
With this plan in mind we cycled our bikes round to Karnagio, which is about 30 minutes from Abelaki (by bike) and consists of a jetty with taverna and beach- perfect! The idea was that this would be easier than trying to get both bikes back into Barberry from Dingleberry (our wee Dinghy) while she bounces around at anchor.
Things started to go awry when Kerry forgot her bike battery and decided she would be fine without it. Surely it would be easy enough since some manage without a battery all the time? She did make it, but I think she regretted the lack of battery on every single hill. Hills that she had barely noticed before. Kerry can be surprisingly vocal when she is working hard.
Once the bikes were dropped off we walked back to Abelaki and dinghied back to Barberry just as an ominous flotilla of large catamarans entered the bay. They started circling around us and rafting up in a row, that was getting closer and closer to us as more boats arrived. Strictly speaking we did not need to move, but to stay would mean a possibly sleepless night with party music. We moved! Or tried to. We let the flotilla skipper know our intentions and he offered to help with our long lines ashore (as he was already in a dinghy himself).
As I went below to switch on the instruments Kerry shouted down ‘the battery’s dead!’. ‘Dead?’ I thought, ‘Dead?’. It did not compute and my brain went into a panicked meltdown. A boat at anchor without an engine is about as much use as a rock attached to the seabed.
As luck might have it we had had a premonition of this happening, when we were in Preveza, and bought a little jump start battery that could be attached to the starter motor. I raced to get the covers off the engine and clip it on, but the leads were too short (of course they were!). Instead I realised I would have dig everything out of the stuffed quarter berth to clip it to the starter battery. Kerry was being surprisingly patient in the cockpit, during this turmoil, and shouting over to the flotilla skipper to ‘just hang on a moment’.
Eventually I got there and fired up the little jump starter. It worked and Kerry wellied Barberry’s engine to make sure it kept going. We moved away from the flotilla, but probably not far enough, as they had brought the traditional flotilla monster party speakers with them, which they set up at Minas taverna and boomed music (or headache inducing sound waves, depending on your perspective) until about 1am.
We had a tense, sleepless night of noise and battery anxiety, so next morning set off for Nydri to buy a new battery. Of course the quarter berth had to be emptied yet again to get the jump starter clipped on. It was only about an hour to Nydri, which was good, as there was no way we were switching off the engine again. Since we had not booked a pontoon I jumped into Dingleberry and motored ashore as Kerry held station on Barberry near Nydri Marine Chandlers. Fortunate they had what we wanted, although I chose the slightly smaller of the two options available as I was not sure I could lift the bigger one into Barberry from the dinghy.
With the new battery on board (the smaller one was liftable by me, and also cheaper, hee-hee) we headed back to our original planned stop of Karnagio, installed the new battery and awaited our friends’ arrival. We took a bit of a breather at this stage as things had actually been a little anxious for a while. I just want to make it clear that, even though we are here to enjoy ourselves, and it often sounds like paradise, there are occasions when it’s not ‘plain sailing’!
