It is the end of July, and we have been anchored at the same spot for almost 2 weeks. Normally we would move after a week or so, but this year we are not heading anywhere, This place is close to perfect. We have good restaurants, a decent grocery store and we have lots of room in the bay. My only complaint would be that the water temperature started out at 28C degrees but with a few days of strong winds from the north it is down to 24.5C degrees. I’ll admit I carry a small cross.
It is wonderful that we can take our boat and anchor for free in a bay that is more or less paradise. There is a hotel in the bay here that charges over 2000 euros a night! They must have very nice rooms. I’m happier on my boat than I would be in that hotel. I can imagine some hotel extras that would be worth 2000 a night but I doubt they have them 😉
There are lots of fish here….I should get an underwater camera to show you pictures. Light blue 10cm fish and also perfectly camouflaged flat fish on the bottom. Something definitely lives in the sand on the bottom as their are densely packed small little piles of sand with a small hole in the middle. Fishing boats also hang around which is another sign of fish. A friend said they saw a dolphin jump in the morning but we haven’t seen it.
It was quite windy for a few days. During the high winds I noticed a nearby boat dragging it’s anchor and going out to sea. A bad thing. The water in the bay had whitecaps and was quite choppy but obviously we needed to go help the boat. I called my buddy Peter (our Crete boat neighbors are also anchored here) and I took my dingy over to his boat so we could both go board the boat and secure it. These small crises don’t happen during good weather, but just before I got to Peter’s boat we saw people on board the dragging boat. They must have been below ‘sleeping’ 😉 No rescue necessary but it was a small adventure.
During the winds I also watched a cargo vessel dock at the nearby public pier. We are about 300m away and he looked like a small cargo vessel (I looked him up later and he was actually 81m long so not so small). I was curious because he was moving very, very slowly towards the dock, even though the wind was pushing him off, which should be safer for him.
I think he was carrying cement, which is the main construction material in Greece. I looked up his Summer Cargo Weight…..and he carries over 3000 tons of cargo! For 3 days there were lines of big dump trucks being loaded by a front-end loader/excavator that was also carried by the ship. I think the ship filled about 300 trucks full of cement! That is a lot of cement.
The next week a similarly sized vessel came but this time it was carrying what I guess was diesel. Diesel and Cement are what power and build Greece (I’ve seen large diesel generators running on various islands). I would have thought that diesel would be easier to move, and there were not as many trucks (obviously the liquid carrying ones now) but it still took about 3 days to offload.
My hobby at the moment is building an LLM (ChatGPT technology) powered clothing shopping app for a potential client. I’m sure you’ve tried ChatGPT, but what you can do at an API (program calling program) level with the various LLMs is quite amazing. Did you know that to ChatGPT any particular word is represented as a list of 1500 numbers? And it has an opinion of what would go well with that red top you have. The latest technique is to break a task up into several stages (planning, research, execute, review, update, as an example) which gives a much better result than just asking ‘do this’. I’m fascinated by the technology and do a few hours of work on this every day. Very interesting.
Have to go pickup Victoria from shore. TTFN
Adventures on Spruzzo 