Bear with a Sore Head

 After a lovely time relaxing at our private beach, it was time to join up with the rest of the flotilla. We sailed across to Ithaca and went from one beautiful beach to another. Our lead crew had picked the charming Poli bay for our night's stay. It was rather special and very unspoilt. This was because there was no harbour and no shore facilities. This meant we had to raft up all the boats a stone's throw from the shore - I say we, although, as usual, it was our hard working lead crew doing all the hard work of tying up and placing anchors.

We did have some work of our own to do though. First we had to pump up our inflatable dinghy so we could row ashore for our flotilla beach picnic. Our paws were pumping madly for quite a long time. It was hard to find a flat surface to put the boat while we pumped, so we opted to use the roof.

It was then quite a logistical feat to get the inflated boat from the roof onto the water, bearing in mind that there are lots of ropes, rails, awnings, not least the boom, to get in the way.

With much pushing, shoving and squeezing we got our dinghy into the cockpit and from there, into the water. It was a good job it was made of tough material.

We then had a very important job to do. We had to make our cocktail to submit at the best cocktail competition that was taking place at the beach picnic. We had thought long and hard about our cocktail. We knew that the male members of our lead crew were beer men, but we were also aware that Katie, our hostie was more of an ouzo girl. We thought we would combine a beer cocktail (3 different types of Greek lagers) with a splash of ouzo. We'd had a trial run the day before and thought it tasted pretty good.

We knew there was a prize for the best decorated cocktail so we really went to town on the decoration and even included one of the turtles for which Zakynthos is famous. See Zak hanging from the top of our 'pitcher'.

We were really pleased with the end result and, even though the cocktail colour wasn't too appetising, we thought the decoration more than made up for it. We even served our cocktail in a cut down Loutraki water bottle, which we thought was a touch of genius, as our lead boat was called Loutraki. And what better name for our cocktail could we choose than 'Bear with a Sore Head'?

Did our lead crew judges like it or not? Find out next time. 

Lots of love, Eddie, George and Yorkie xxx