ENVOY AROUND CORFU

Leaving Parga on Greece's mainland coast we cruise further up to Mourtos – one of Di's favorite shopping areas and also one of mine as they have an excellent hardware store and more importantly a great bakery with delicious chocolate cakes.

Parga harbour viewed from castle

At many of these small boat harbors it's quite difficult to find a place to leave your tender as nowhere provides a designated area and you have to find a spot among the local small fishing boats. There is no real concern about theft, just finding a vacant spot.

The first night at Mourtos there's a lot of lightning in the distance and this is always a bit disconcerting because if a thunderstorm arrives it can often bring nasty squalls and wind shifts. Our only few bad nights aboard Envoy have been during thunderstorms, but fortunately this one stays well away.

Another night we return to Envoy from ashore to find a yacht anchored much too close to us – at times only four metres away. We put out fenders but don't actually touch during the night.

We cruise over to Petriti on the island of Corfu stopping on the way to anchor off the Levkimmi Canal and take the dinghy up about a mile to the sleepy village of Levkimmi for lunch. We'd done this before with Frank and Marie but not with Chris.

Chris and Laurie moor the RHIB at Levkimmi canal

Our Naiad hydraulic stabilisers aren't operational at this point, but it's been so calm that so far we've only deployed our other paravane system – the “Birds” once. During this time we tried deploying just one “Bird”, something we've never done before. Using one certainly reduces roll but induces a lean to the side it's deployed so we didn't like it – if we wanted to cruise along on a lean we'd have bought a sailing yacht!

We spend a couple of nights anchored off Petriti and have a great evening ashore at a restaurant overlooking Envoy's anchorage to celebrate our 48^th wedding anniversary.

By now we've run all of Envoy's equipment except for the watermaker (which we plan to use a bit later when Envoy's new owners join us for a couple of weeks) and everything is working well except for the Naiads and the B&G Network wind.

Our new air horn installed late last year wasn't working properly and we found that its air supply tubes had kinked and blocked the air supply. It was an easy matter to replace the tubes with new slightly shorter ones to prevent it kinking again and then it worked fine.

Leaving Petriti we cruise north stopping to anchor off Gouvia town, then Kalami, Ormos Ay Stefanos and Avalaki.

View from the Durell's White House in Kalami

During this time Chris and I spend some time trying to find the cause of a very small fresh water leak inside the main head's storage cabinet. It turned out to be a leaking anti-syphon valve for the toilet. I didn't even know this valve was there and it was a bit tricky to remove – but we did so and it's now cleaned up and working properly again ready to be re-installed.

Chris working on our leaking anti-syphon valve and close-up of the valve

There's a few super yachts around including this Australian-owned one with a helo on its foredeck

Chris and Laurie with busker in traditional costume

We spend four nights in Corfu's Gouvia marina to sort out a couple of technical issues left over from last year. While there we catch up with Bruce and Gavin from catamaran Midi and have a great night out at a Corfu restaurant, which is a bit different as you just write down what you want to eat and mostly they have it available.

Last year we left our BandG Network Wind instrument with a technician – Dimitris - to fix. Several months ago we'd sent him an eye watering 600 Euros for parts and he says it fixed and ready to install.

So up the mast he goes and fits the sensor. “Is it working?” he shouts down. “No” I reply – dammit!

So next day he arranges for two technicians from the B&G local agents to take a look. These guys seemed to have a methodical approach and were able to fix it within an hour, so all was well. I could have bought a new unit for less than 600 Euros, but the one we have is part of a network and also has a useful built-in battery voltage monitor which new ones don't have.

On Friday 21 June two technicians arrive from Athens to investigate why our Naiad hydraulic stabilisers are making loud banging noises when in use. Dimitris is an electrician and Konstantinos a mechanic – both very nice, competent and hard-working guys.

Laurie with Dimitris and Konstantinos

After checking the system over we start it in the marina and the loud knocking noises soon start.

A couple of years ago we had a modification done by the same company to lock the fins in the central position when de-energised. This was to avoid the need to manually lock the fins in their central position when anchored in rolly conditions so they don't bang from side to side. Dimitris has a theory that the valves fitted to achieve this central locking were the wrong ones and they are causing over-heating the hydraulic fluid leading to the knocking noises. So they remove the centring valve on the port side and the knocking noises disappear. In fact they seem to disappear on both sides. We do an hour long sea trial and they work perfectly. They also re-route the Naiad's oil cooler hoses as they were very close to the Lugger's lagged exhaust. This wasn't a danger but was affecting the cooling. Next day they remove the centring valve on the starboard side and we do a sea trial about 90 minutes long with the system working well. Since then we have cruised for several hours, including one nine hour cruise with quite a swell running and all is working well. The plan going forward is for these guys to obtain the correct valves from USA and fit them when we come back to Greece from Italy in September. So that was excellent news too as it's a great deal easier switching on the hydraulic stabilisers than deploying the “Birds”. I still can't fully understand why the system worked fine for several months after the centring valves were installed. Dimitris tried to explain to me it was something to do with the valve's internal springs but full meaning was lost in language and my lack of technical understanding.

Next Post – our visit to Albania.