Wednesday 19 June 2019 – Levkas

You will see there is a family dispute over the spelling of this place.  Richard spells it with a ‘v’ because that is how it is spelt in the pilot book.  But the flag announcing this place spells it with an ‘f’ and that is how I also spell it. Make of it as you will.

Anyway we left Vathi fairly early.  I was a bit worried about leaving.   I forgot to mention in my blog that when we arrived here we went aground!  We were asked to just wait 5 minutes before mooring and as we tried to manoeuver we stopped dead.  We thought we must have snagged a line on the keel or rudders, but then noticed that the depth was only just over 1 meter.  So we took up the keel and all was well.  The marina still insisted there was 2 meters depth. Anyway, we had no trouble leaving.

We only had 10 miles to go. There was no pretence at sailing. There was no wind and even when it did eventually get up to 5 knots, it was more or less on the nose.  We didn’t want to go in to the marina early but we know a pleasant anchorage on the way, just before entering the canal.  So we stopped there at about 12:30 and had a comfortable couple of hours swimming and having lunch.  

We arrived at the marina at about 3pm.  Would you believe it.  After a day of barely a breeze it started blowing a 4 gusting 17 knots as we came in to moor.  Nonetheless we moored without trouble.  We have been given a berth way at the end of the marina near the town.  I was worried it was too far away from everything, but in fact it is quite convenient both to the facilities and to the town.

We have more or less stayed on board.  My foot where I was stung yesterday is acting up.  I have a large itchy achy lump under the toe.  I am hoping that antiseptic cream will sort that out.  But I am trying to stay off it.  So we had dinner on board.

We have discovered a major problem, having nothing to do with the boat.  Richard tried to pay our car insurance and got a message saying the bank will send us a text with a number we can use to verify the transaction. No text message was received and when he tried again he got the message that our bank account has been frozen!  When he tried to ring the bank to sort it out he found that the phone won’t make calls, and this explained why no text message was received.  I had this yesterday trying to phone the electrician, but thought it was just poor coverage. Now we wonder if the phone has been blocked because the bank won’t pay the bill, which is larger than usual.  We have other credit cards but they too may be stopped if the bank won’t pay.  It could be a disaster.  We do always have the French credit card, but that has a fairly low credit limit.   We can get WIFI and have sent emails to the bank and Vodafone, but have had no reply.  This could get interesting not in a good way.

To distract us we played some backgammon.  I don’t know why I play with Richard.  In our last game he got 5 high doubles bearing off!  He must have loaded dice!