Author Archives: Jeff Williams

We stayed in Astypalia for just over a week. It is a perfect spot to hang out. Eventually we needed to head to Ios, which is about a 50nm trip (say 9 hours) north-west. We wanted to wait for the best possible winds, but we needed to be in Ios by the 19th to meetContinue reading “Astypalia to Ios”

I was surprised we had not left the marina yet, but May was unusually cold and wet for Crete, and we didn’t want to leave with crummy weather. We had a terrible rainy Friday, but then the rest of the week looked good, and most importantly we had east-west winds so we could sail north.Continue reading “And…..we are off!”

This is a picture of the Genoa Furler Motor from above. The Genoa, or JIb (there is a technical difference) is the big sail at the front of the boat. There is a control in the cockpit that lets me take in or let out the Genoa immediately. The lines holding the foot of theContinue reading “Genoa Furler Motor Adventure”

Victoria and I did our now regular trip to Volos for Easter. I enjoy Victoria’s mom feeding me at every opportunity, and biking and walking by the sea daily is amazing. The picture above is showing everyone in the neighbourhood going to the church at midnight and holding candles to celebrate Easter and the endContinue reading “Easter in Volos and more Boat Repairs”

If you check the picture you can see some brave and lucky tourists (some chance they are local ex-pats) on the beach! They really lucked out as today and the next few days are going to be 10-22 degrees C and perfect. Hard to believe it is not even April yet. During my almost dailyContinue reading “Tourists are Back!”

This is the bow-thruster after I removed the propeller. We broke the bow-thruster last year in Naxos by catching a line….the propeller would turn but would no longer move the boat. I tried changing the propeller (a small adventure in itself) but that did not fix the problem…..so something internal was broken. The gears insideContinue reading “Surgery on the Boat!”

We left the boat at the end of November to fly back to Canada…..but we decided to do a 3 day stopover in Paris. Naturally the wheel on my luggage was broken. My rolling luggage became dragging luggage. Dragging 50 pounds over uneven pavement. The 2 km walk from the train station to the hotelContinue reading “Paris, Toronto, Greece and Maintenance”

The picture above is not a stop sign. Be not deceived. No local driver will stop. It is curiously placed before a roundabout, which is common in Greece even though the point of roundabouts is to not force incoming traffic to stop. If you treat the ‘STOP’ sign as ‘YIELD’ then all is reasonable. CarsContinue reading “Driving in Greece”

We came back to our Crete marina in mid September because Victoria wanted to go to Athens and visit her daughter. Victoria left for Athens, and I was a stereotypical guy alone on his boat. Victoria being away made me productive. I did a few boat projects. The first thing I did was to finishContinue reading “Summer is long in Crete”

After a few days in Elounda Bay we decided to return to our home marina early. The forecast for the next several days was too much wind for us to dock without a bow-thruster, and our marina friends who would help us dock would not be around on Friday when the winds were forecast toContinue reading “Back to Agios Nicholaos Marina”