It’s a Small World

It was nearly midnight and the sea around the boat was churning and splashing with the crew from the Beluga. It had been a fairly easy but long crossing from Kos to Astypalaia and we all felt sticky and stinky. All at once I heard Bonnie’s eager voice urging me to “Come here! The water is twinkling!” Naturally it took me a-bit to locate her in the blackness of night, but sure enough! When I got closer, I too was surrounding by little sparkling lights. Like two little fairy’s (I know, I know, just let me have my moment) we swam around, gasping and exclaiming. Bioluminescent algae I believe is the correct term. Looks alot prettier than it sounds. It wasn’t very thick, not like you see in pics online, but it was more like little twinkly lights around you. Later, when Andrew and I were brushing our teeth and spitting overboard we noticed that it twinkled when when our spit hit the water. Very cool. Our mouths have never been rinsed better.

But back to the beginning. We will draw the curtain over the main chunk of morning as it involved boring things like packing up and buying provisions for our sailing week ahead. Some shopped, some drank Monster, we piddled around Kos Castle and in general made our way to the Marina for our 12:30 boat pickup. Mike from Archon Yacht Rentals showed us the boat basics and there commenced endless packing, stowing, adjusting and excuse-me-ing. Also applying of Sea Sick patches and last minute jaunts to the store for garbage bags, clothes pins, snorkel mask, paper towel and etc. Archon suddenly had to do some maintenance on the navigation, and then they needed to stop for a bit to go have a drink. Sometime in there we ate delicious gyros and the list went on. It was almost 15:00 before our pilot wiggled us out from between all the other boats sandwiched in the harbor and gave us a cheery goodbye as he hopped off at the harbor exit.

Our vessel is a Lagoon 380 catamaran named Beluga. Suitable name, as she is sorta fat and white. You can read all the specs here.

https://archonyachting.com/fleet/lagoon-380-s2-beluga

Please note that while all looks terrific on paper and the writer flung the word luxury around quite freely, reality is a little different. It is nice, absolutely. But.

• When you try to pump the floor drain after you shower in the port shower, instead of the water receding you get more of an Old Faithful geyser effect. Too bad that only showed up after someone had showered already. We found out that Kim is good at bailing.
• There was an alarm that intermittently shrieked on our VHF because our location was lost and the Distress Button wouldn’t work correctly if we needed it. It’s supposed to transmit your location to the Coast Guard if you hit it. Apparently ours won’t. This only yells every four hours or so and requires hitting “ignore”.
• A certain pump kept ceaselessly turning on and off in the bilge, triggering a most annoying intermittent alarm on our electrical panel. We moved fuses, opened and peered into all the bilge compartments, found large amounts of water in one and more piddling in at a rapid rate. 30 minutes out of port the intermittent part of the alarm was no longer correctly describing the situation, and instead we had a regular beep beep beep beep beep beep, repeating. After a variety of texts and photos and videos, a dude from the base video called and walked me through snipping some wires. Quite important ones, but who cares. It killed the alarm! It also killed our automatic bilge pump. I also showed the guy how the water was legit flowing into the bilge and he just chuckled and said “who knows”. Ok. I can handle that.
• We assumed the water could be coming in around the sail drive shaft, where the prop shaft goes through the side of the boat. The engine readout was showing the “water detected” light, but since it wasn’t actually screaming we ignored it.
• The navigation was still not entirely cooperating, but we managed to find a screen that showed the most pertinent information. We also have iNav on my phone, so won’t get lost right away. It does seem to be holding its own, though the compass isn’t quite properly calibrated.
• I checked the bilge again after a couple hours and was astonished to find it nearly overflowing! We had to get quite serious about remembering to pump it out regularly until Darwin and Dalen discovered the cause of the problem. A missing light at the rear bottom of the boat, leaving a big old hole for all the splashing waves to flow right in. They found a replacement plug and that should be sorted now.

But other than that small list, things are good. She’s a sturdy little craft and handles very well. What’s a few problems here or there. To be honest, that is the essence of sailing. While maintenance on land is an annoying habit to be avoided at all costs, there’s a siren’s call in the idea of doing critical maintenance while you are in an uncomfortable and vulnerable situation. Hanging your head into smelly bilges while trying to communicate with a heavily accented Greek man on a phone all the while hoping the motion sickness stays at bay. The last is the reason it was my head in the bilge. I had the guy, possibly George, repeat everything at least twice and when he said “get a knife and cut the wire” I had him say it three times. It’s fun balancing precariously here and there, fixing this and that and knowing you actually do have to get it fixed or be sunk. Heh. Not to mention having to use the boat hook to rescue runaway underwear that sailed overboard in the harbor.

So for anyone thinking sailing is all about salt and sun and snorkeling, go figure.

The weather was absolutely perfect all day. The sun shone, the waves were little and the wind was from dead ahead. Bummer. It stayed blowing in the no sail zone the entire way to Astypalaia, which was 59 miles in total, so we had the joy of the throbbing engines all the way. To be honest, we didn’t technically anchor at Astypalaia, the harbor was in a little island called Kounoupi. Even in the dark we could see the white sand on the bottom in eight meters of water. Unbelievable!

Anchoring was followed by a vigorous swim, as was mentioned above. A few poor folks had been having a little trouble finding their sea legs, so I can’t say there was 100% participation in the swimming event, but everyone was upright and smiling, even if they weren’t exactly twinkling.

Sleep was delightful. The gentle rocking was soothing and the stars shone down brilliantly. We were the only humans in sight.