The day after Terrible Tuesday started calm and gentle. We’d been ready to leave thinking every night was going to be like last night but we decided to stay and give it a chance. And we’re glad we did – Vathi is now one of our favourite places. Once the […]

Eris is the Greek goddess of chaos, strife and discord. She was certainly having a good time in Vathi, Ithaka the day we arrived. It was one of those days….. We couldn’t get an internet signal in Petalas so decided to wing it and leave without one, having being driven […]

Our plan was to do a clockwise circuit of the Ionian, running down the mainland, across to the Peloponnese and back up the islands. After Mitika our next stop was Petalas on the mainland, our longest journey for a while at 20nm. Once we were south of Kalamos a F6 […]

Having had to cut short our last trip to Kalamos island because of our unwelcome guest we went to try again, this time with the aim to visit the main village. A windless day meant a motor across flat seas to the distinctively hump backed island. We didn’t want to go into […]

We’d been put off from visiting Spartochori by stories of how busy it got there, but when we finally decided to go it was anything but. We arrived about midday and chose to go to the quay at the southern end (by Taverna Spilia), rather than the one off to […]

Ratty, Roland, Ben, Basil. Whichever cosy name we gave our furry stowaway it didn’t make the rat any less unwelcome. We were very lax when we tied our lines ashore at Port Leone on Kalamos. Not once did it cross our minds to put anything on the lines to stop a […]

After the watermaker repairs it was time to head further afield so we headed down to Port Leone on the southern end of Kalamos Island as we both wanted to see the abandoned village there. The village (also known as Kefali) was abandoned after the large earthquake in 1953 which […]

We had to head back to Nidri to get some parts to try and fix the leak on our watermaker. Purity and volume were good but we had a bit of weepage out of the ends of the membrane housings. One of the retaining bands around the housings had split […]

A short hop from Ormo Varko around the corner brought us to Palairos, also on the mainland. Approaching the small harbour at Palairos we could see the beach to the south with a couple of boats anchored to the north. It looked like there were a few bars lining the […]

We spent the last week anchored in Bungalow Bay (the eastern end of Ormo Varko). We had a bit of boat work to do – sticking on Crazy Horse’s name stickers to our new dinghy, fixing reverse on the outboard, commissioning the watermaker and tracking down a leak on it; […]

and we can now make some to drink! When we bought Emerald in America back in 2004, we got a bit over excited in the chandleries there as at the time the dollar to £ was almost 2 to 1. We ended up cramming Emerald with lots of goodies including […]

We’ve not had much luck with the dinghies we’ve owned. First off was the one that came with Emerald, a 3.1m Quicksilver inflatable with wooden floor. It weighed about 3 million tonnes making it a pain to haul up on beaches or onto the davits. After our 3 month trip […]

Leaving our Med mooring spot in Ormo Abelike went perfectly, there was barely any wind which helped a lot. As soon as Colin untied the windward stern line, Emerald gently moved forward as the taught anchor chain obeyed the laws of physics (Hooke’s law for those that care) and returned […]

Emerald is a 1979 Kelly Peterson cutter, our home as we wander slowly around the watery world. This blog provides a place for us to document our travels and the work we do to upgrade and keep her maintained. We hope you enjoy it. To be kept up to date with the […]

Doing something for the first time in Emerald can make us a little nervous, particularly if it involves close quarters manoeuvring. So today we set off for our first ‘tying to a tree’ Med mooring adventure with just a little trepidation nibbling away at us. There are three large bays […]