RETURN TO LEFKAS, GREECE

Our advertising of Envoy on this Blog has resulted in an offer to purchase from long time readers of the Blog. In fact not only have this Australian couple been following our Blog since its inception, but followed Envoy's Atlantic Crossing by the previous owners in 2004. The potential buyer's offer is naturally subject to their inspection and survey which will take place here in Lefkas late October. So Envoy is “under offer” and we won't be considering any further offers unless this sale doesn't proceed.

We've arrived in Lefkada after a good trip from Auckland spending one night in Dubai and one in Athens on the way. Emirates are a great airline and the nearly 17 hour flight passed quite quickly aided by a solid 8 hours sleep. We like Emirates 30kg luggage allowance, their lenient attitude towards cabin bags and the generous space between economy seat rows. Having a spare seat between us on both flights certainly helped too. Our hotel in Dubai was good and it's a convenient place to break the trip.

We arived to find Envoy as expected on the hardstand under the care of our contractor – Sailand with everything looking good and more progress getting her ready for cruising than we expected.

Sailand completed a refurbishment of the Lugger's exhaust system which included replacing some exhaust sections, building a new stainless steel muffler and replacing all heat insulation.

They had also completed Envoy's anti fouling and attended to a small list of winter jobs:

-Re-sealing two acylic ventilation hatches into their aluminium frames because the sealant had failed

-Servicing the sea water circulating pumps on the generator and wing engine (we get this done annually)

-Checking the wing engine's shaft seal, prop and prop shaft

-Checking the main prop shaft's alignment, internal rubber sleeve and clamps, removing the stuffing box's sealings for inspection and finding them in good condition, greasing and replacing them

-Changing the main gearbox oil and cleaning its oil strainer

-Replacing a leaking galley sink mixer/faucet with a new one

-Replacing the large Nautica RHIB's start battery

Another contractor has also polished Envoy's bootstripe and white topsides gelcoat areas while yet another has repaired a slow air leak in one of the pontoons of our smaller Valiant RHIB.

Today was quite a sight when a huge crane came alongside Envoy to lift our larger RHIB down onto a trailer for annual servicing of its 25HP Yamaha outboard. Also today I took four inflatable life jackets in for two-yearly servicing together with one fire extinguisher which has its gauge needle in the red when it should be in the green.

There's a few more jobs being done on Tuesday such as filter replacements and then on Wednesday we expect to launch Envoy and do a short sea trial with Sailand's engineer aboard. Then we hope to leave the marina by the weekend. Sorry no pictures in this posting.