agility @ sea

Tim and I are settling into things nicely as we enjoy a beautiful sail heading north this afternoon. We sailed off anchor successfully and that’s always fun – a little showing off.

Two weeks ago we had visitors, Tarun, Dawn, Kayla and Tejay.  Tarun worked with Tim for years (Dawn did briefly as well) and we were so fortunate that they came to visit as part of Dawn’s daughter Kayla’s college graduation trip.  It was a nearly perfect trip (from my perspective at least, and I’m confidant they had a great time too).  Our first stop after their arrival was Mljet, an island I have fond memories of from 16 years ago.  Unfortunately, we had a little engine issue that Tim needed to address so he was left aboard while the rest of us explored the island.  I was a bit overambitious with the bike rental plan, but Tarun dealt with the brunt of that carting Tejay on the rack on the back of his bike over a couple relatively significant hills.  We were completely old school riding without helmets and in flip flops, but managed to have a great time and get to the monastery and back unscathed. We also did some swimming, paddle boarding, and game playing while anchored in Mljet.

The following day after a slow start we headed to Korcula due to the engine issue being primarily a low fuel issue.  The engine doesn’t like the fuel getting low – perhaps Tim can offer a more mechanical explanation, but I am comfortable being on alert that we cannot run the fuel down as low as we thought we could. We fueled at a brutal station subject to huge wakes from traffic and then took off to anchor and have another nice evening.  I’m getting al little fuzzy on the order of everything, so will leave this with we had a ton of fun, lots of swimming, paddle boarding, star gazing and dinosaur basketball (Tejay’s favorite game).  The last day was the only glitch due to weird weather forecasts and we ended up having a very long day beating into it, but people mainly dozed a lot and all was good once we got back to the marina.  Well, sort of good, we had an extremely rough night and I’m not sure anyone got much sleep, but everyone got off in the early morning, Tim and I did laundry, had someone clean the boat (they were terrible so that won’t be happening again) and went to bed early!

Since then we’ve been island hopping, dealing with wasps, and had an ant event similar to what was experienced at Wimbledon.  We had gone to bed early, I got back up to see if the wasp situation had gotten under control and noticed that the entire boat was covered with flying ants!  The next morning, most of the ants were gone, but they left a ton of wings.  It was creepy.  I did some research and I guess it was a one time only (I hope) ant mating ritual.  We had to kill residual ants throughout the day, but all is under control right now.  The wasps have died down a bit too, but I don’t hold out long term hope for that.  At least they keep the mosquitoes down and I’ve only been stung once.

What else?  There are zillions of naked people who participate in lots of activities.  Paddle boarding, yoga, boat maintenance, and dinghy riding (I can’t help but wonder where they’re going) to name a few. The food is good here and primarily cooked on open fires, the water is clear and the water temperature is up to 78 degrees!  15 degrees warmer from when we started in Greece.  We swim multiple times a day and have been going out on the paddle boards every morning.  We’ll be headed home in less than 2 weeks for Elizabeth’s wedding which is very exciting!