And the Best of the Rest ...

I could talk about sailing in Greece forever, but my B.U. colleagues have been politely encouraging me to wind up this marvellous adventure, so they can take their turn at reporting some of the other exciting things we've been up to this summer.

And so, I have to try and give you the rest of our adventures in a nutshell.

The last few days were spent sailing between different ports on those 2 wonderful islands of Kephalonia and Ithaca. We all love them both, but as Ithaca is a bit quieter, it gets our top vote.

We continued to have lots of fun, in particular when it came to helping our male minder celebrate a special birthday. We'll let you into a secret, it was his 50th! This doesn't seem so old to some of our more venerable members such as Jimmy and Ungi, but to youngsters such as myself and Louis it does seem quite old, although our minders don't appear old at all.

It wasn't a coincidence that we were on flotilla for the big birthday, it had been planned that way, as our minder couldn't think of anything he'd rather be doing on this auspicious day. A great day it was too. While we were strolling round the harbour after breakfast, our boat was boarded and decorated with the led crew's birthday flag (seen above flying with our Norfolk flag), lots of balloons and banners.

We had a race on leaving harbour, which we didn't win, but who cared?, then a fairly slow sail, searching for wind, and a pleasant hour or two at anchor in a delightful bay swimming and sunbathing. We moored that night at Big Vathi and, at the group meal that evening, the lead crew presented the birthday cake they had made. We were thrilled to see it was in the shape of a bear - clearly in honour of us bears ...

Even though it hadn't risen as it should (something to do with confusion over flour types in Greek) but there was plenty to go around and it was truly scrumptious, except for the ears which were made of cardboard. It was our first taste of a yoghurt cake and was a taste we must experience again (note to self - talk to Chef Oakley).

The next highlight was our evening rafting up at Polis Bay. There is nothing there except peace and quiet and nature at its best. See what we mean ...

We started the evening with a blindfolded race on upturned dinghies which we won by miles! In the absence of a taverna we all rowed ashore for a beach barbecue, with the most fabulous array of salads, and one of our favourite competitions, the best cocktail competition. This time we learned from our mistakes of our previous attempt (3 years ago). We kept the ingredients simple, but the decoration fancy (thanks to turtles Zak & Stavros for starring), and this time we won, although our re-used name of 'Bear with a Sore Head' and enterprising story to go with it, may have swung it for us.  None of the cocktails did very well on the flammability test!

From Polis Bay it was time to return to base at Sivota to clean our boats and pack to go home - big sigh! Still we had our final evening and last group meal to enjoy. At the customary awards ceremony most of the crews were presented with signed pirate flags, but not us. We got the Colgate award for always smiling, whatever befell us, and we were presented with a marvellous wooden bear, aptly named Ellie, after the lead boat's name of Elpida.

As you can see I also got a big hug from skipper Liz, so I was very happy. 

All good things come to an end though, and the next morning we piled into coaches to head for the airport and home. We'd all had a splendid time, so thanks again to all the marvellous people at Sailing Holidays. It was more a case of saying Au revoir, rather than goodbye, as one thing we do know, is that we do intend to be on another Sailing Holiday's flotilla before too long (D.V). 

Lots of love, Eddie and the all the B.U. crew of Analipsi xxx

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