5. Homer’s Home

The following day we went to Vahti on the neighbouring island Ithaca. Home of Homer from the Iliad. This was another nice place with something as unusual as a perfect depth for anchoring in the bay. The whole bay had 4 metres of depth over a mud bottom. A perfect place to sweat out a storm. We didn’t have storm conditions, but we had lots of rain for 24 hours. After spending the first day ashore we stayed on the boat the entire second day. It gave us the perfect opportunity to see if the hatches were leak tight. I really didn’t want to come back to Tropea a second time after a winter to find the boat full of rainwater which was what we experienced when we returned in the spring 2016. It also gave us the opportunity to clean out all the food and medicine storage areas and get rid of a bunch of old stuff. We had seen a cockroach on land the day before and were reminded of that we really did not want an invasion of these onboard. We threw away old rice, coffee, spices, soups, pills and maybe most interesting, a packet of Swedish vanilla sauce that should have been used by 2014. It must have travelled with us all the way from Sweden back in 2013. The only living creature we found was a very small maggot in an opened packet of Uncle Ben’s rice that had expired 2016. We really have to be more careful with the state of our food storage areas going forward as we would not have been so lucky in the tropics.

We rounded off the evening with watching Romancing the Stone with a very young Michael Douglas. Cool to see that his character also dreamed of sailing around the world.

We lifted the anchor the following day to go back to Cephalonia. To Ay Eufimia this time. Before leaving Vahti we got our tanks filled. We had only consumed 200 litres of water, 37 litres of diesel and 5 litres of petrol so it really wasn’t necessary, but it was easy to get to the filling station and I had crew onboard. I calculated that I had consumed just over 2 litres per hour since Gouvia. Almost too good to be true but we had cruised at 1750-1800 rpm and 6 knots rather than 2000 rpm and 7 knots. I think I will continue with this as it seems to pay off.