Sun 19 May – Preveza to Vonitsa

Have I mentioned yet that one of the things we want to do differently this season is to sail more and run the engine less? I must have mentioned it before. 😀

Part of the reason is that sailing is just so much more fun. The boat feels better, gliding through the waves, and of course tweaking the sail trim gives you something to do. Apart from that, there are also a few purely practical reasons. For one, using less diesel means spending less money. It’s also better for the environment. And, it delays the dreaded engine service. We’re supposed to do a small engine service, one where you change the oil and oil filters every 100 hours and a big service that changes all the fuel filters as well every 200 hours. So with our new found commitment to “sail more, motor less” in mind we left Preveza on Sunday morning. The plan was to head into the Ambracian Gulf. We picked Vonitsa as a destination as this looked like it would protect us best from the gnarly southerlies that were forecasted. Now in the olden days we would have just stuck on the engine and motored there as Vonitsa is really only about two hours from Preveza under engine. Not this time though! As is often the case, the wind was coming directly from where we wanted to go. Even a fantastic and all round wonderful sailboat like Bini can’t go straight into the wind. So we opted to “short tack” along the channel to Vonitsa, which means that we sail as close to the wind as we can, and frequently tack through the wind, slowly clawing our way up to our destination. If that sounds like hard work, that’s about right. Short tacking means constantly switching the sails from one side of the boat to the other, while making almost no actual progress towards the destination. Still, we persevered, and made it into our anchorage just off the beach in Vonitsa before lunch time. 

First order of business was check out the little town, and find some lunch. We found a table in a taverna just off the beach, with the locals eyeing us inquisitively as we devoured a proper Greek lunch. To walk off the newly acquired calories we set off to explore Vonitsa by foot. Not much to report there, it’s a small town that seems to mostly wait for the influx of tourists later in the season. There is a small castle, but it was closed so we couldn’t get inside. Back to the boat we settled into a night that could not have been more calm and quiet