The turtle's first swim

She floats!

Wow. What a week. I feel like I need a year-long sailing sabbatical just to recover from the stress involved in preparing for the year-long sailing sabbatical. But we’re here! We did it! The sun is shining! The sails work! We have two fridges! Life is good.

Saying goodbye really brought out my family’s tendency towards the melodramatic: they all acted as though I were a teenage soldier heading for the trenches, rather than a 31-year-old millennial going on an extended holiday. The tears! The trauma! My three-year-old nephew threw himself on the sofa and started wailing. My dad kept on saying “it will be ok” in a way that very much implied that it would not be ok. And my mum removed the silver chain she always wears around her neck and strung it around mine, so that she would “always be with me” (she is visiting us in July).

Mum also had a special flag made for the boat - featuring an emblem of a fish and a pen (our dual passions lol) - and strung up nautically-themed bunting. Obsessed.

Meanwhile, friends felt it helpful to send me various articles and videos about travellers who have encountered misfortune on the high seas, including this, this and this. Thanks guys.

Anyway. Packing was obviously a logistical nightmare. It was, I found out, impossible to squeeze four bumper-sized boxes of Yorkshire tea, three disco lights, two microphones, a strobe and a milk frother into one moderately-sized suitcase. Baffling. Charlie, however, still managed to cram no fewer than ten fishing reels into his. Of course, this took our baggage about a million kilos over the maximum weight. So, we had to pack several reels into our carry-on, which caused total pandemonium at airport security, resulting in every single one of our bags being searched. The perils of being an angler.

Miraculously, we made it to Preveza with all our luggage, so rewarded ourselves with a Mythos in the first taverna we came across. Let me tell you: it rly does hit different when you know you don’t have to fly home in a week(!). We spent that first night in a B&B - me madly trying to finish a work deadline and Charlie frantically trying to fill in various complicated forms in before we were due to launch the boat the following morning. (FYI for all you sailing novices out there, launching just means putting the boat in the water).

The Turtle had been in dry dock (stored in a yard, out of the water) all winter and its first swim really was quite a thing to behold - comparable to seeing cows held in a shed for six months unleashed into a meadow. In a nutshell, the boat gets lowered onto a trailer then dragged by a tractor to the launch area. Here, it is transferred into an enormous robotic sling before being carried down to the water and somewhat unceremoniously plonked in.

Delighted to discover that she floats, we hopped on board and - once we’d figured out where the on button was - putt-putted over to the marina to dock the boat. Then the REAL work began. The deck was caked in a thick layer of Saharan dust, which we spent the best part of a day attempting to clean off. This involved hauling up seawater with a rusty bucket (there is a hose but we couldn’t find the right attachment lol) - and scrubbing the entire boat with a toothbrush like a pair of overzealous dental hygienists.

Then there was all the STUFF. I thought we’d be moving into an empty shell - but the Turtle was full to brimming with the previous owner’s gubbins. Half empty bottles of bleach, books, pot noodles, old duvet covers, blankets, tins of tuna, boxes of miscellaneous string, broken phone chargers: every cupboard we opened revealed more of it. There were some cracking things too: the collection of goggles, the sailing almanacs, the specialist boat cleaning products (Chazzle got v excited about these), the paddle board - all of which, if we had to buy new, would have set us back a hefty wad of cash. Hmm maybe that bottle of bleach was actually half full.

Still, once we hauled it all into the open, we we came to a painful realisation: the previous owner had a dog - and that dog was of the moulting variety. Being my mother’s daughter, I knew that there was only one logical course of action: to purchase a mini hand held hoover. Reader: if you are not the owner of a mini hand held hoover, take this as your cue to buy one. They really are excellent. Cutlery drawer full of chuff? Mini hand held hoover. Sand in the bed? Mini hand held hoover. Boat blanketed in dog hair? You get the idea.

After quite literally DAYS of scrubbing, sorting, unpacking and vigorously and enthusiastically mini-hoovering, the Turtle was ready for business. But we couldn’t set off until we picked up the Transit Log - a piece of paper without which you aren’t legally allowed to sail around Greece (for something so seemingly fly by the seat of your pants, boating rly does involve an awful lot of paperwork).

That Turtle sure does scrub up nice

So, at 2.45 on Friday afternoon, we headed to the port office in Preveza to pick one up. Unfortunately, the office had closed at 2.30 and would not be open again until Monday.

This slightly threw a spanner in the works, as we’d invited our friend Al and his friend Hugo (now also our friend!) out to join us on our maiden voyage. Hugo is a sailing instructor based on the Isle of Wight (check out Salty Sailing), so Chaz recruited him to help set up the boat and teach me once and for all which side starboard is. Did he succeed? Tune in next time to find out.