Fri 17 May – Paxos to Préveza

Sometimes, things just work out the way you planned. Today was one of those days. One of the things we want to do differently this season is sail more, and make better use of the wind. If that means waiting for a couple of days for the wind to turn favourable, so be it. And that’s exactly what happened today. We’ve been eyeing the north-westerly winds which we’ve been seeing consistently on the forecast for a couple of days. That should mean the perfect wind for a nice downwind passage from Gaios to Preveza. So in eager anticipation we filled up the water tanks to the brim, put on our best sailing gear and set off at 1030 in the morning.

The first hour or so looked like the weather gods were making fun of us. Not again! There was absolutely no wind and the sea was flat, just like a mirror. An hour into our journey a few ripples appeared, and we thought to hoist every bit of sail we own to catch as much wind as possible. That meant digging out our humongous gennaker and rigging it up. Always a fun exercise after you haven’t done it in a while. Where does this line go? Is this allowed to cross over that? Not too long and we were flying both the main sail and the gennaker. Hurray!

Unfortunately, as quickly as the wind picked up, it died down again, and the gennaker kept lazily collapsing on itself. We dropped the main sail in one smooth 360 degree turn and sailed under gennaker alone, which was a bit better. We still weren’t making too much way though. The swell started throwing us around a bit which was quite annoying as everything on the boat gets chucked around. At the same time it also meant that hopefully the wind was building. And sure enough, after a couple of minutes bopping up and down in the swell, we were making a nice 4.5 knots with the wind on the starboard quarter. And this pretty much continued for the whole day. What a treat! We sailed pretty much the complete 40 miles passage, the last few miles under jib alone as the wind had picked up to around 15 knots. We had Bob (the dinghy) on a pretty short rein off the back which was a bit of a mistake as with the swell directly behind us he kept banging into the stern. Must dig out a longer line.

Coming into Préveza was a bit tricky as we had to make it through a fairly narrow buoyed channel with a 20 knot wind aft and plenty of boats coming out. Our plan was to moor up to the town quay again, but the stiff breeze as well as a bunch of boats moored alongside canned that plan. We did find a half decent looking spot but the guys on the neighbouring boats both came rushing out to tell us to mind a big underwater shelf. We saw a space between two boats but it was going to be very tight, and after a few circles we thought better of it. We headed into the anchorage instead and found a nice place to drop the hook and enjoy the sunset over (the still very chilly!) Préveza bay.