Lucky to be here book

Whatever we have done, one of my prime motivations has always been that it had to have some element of fun attached. Even hard physical work can be fun if you are sharing it with someone else who has a good sense of humour and you can laugh at each others jokes or ribbing. Initially, it was great fun just living here and learning lots of stuff with like minded people. The local Greeks too have a great sense of humour and fun and love to rib each other, although sometimes their ribbing can have a nasty element of putting people down in it. However, most Greeks can give as good as they get so that is not usually a problem. I love to laugh and have a slightly bizarre outlook on life and usually manage to see the funny side of almost all situations. I have found that if you can share a smile or a laugh with someone, it makes life so much better. I have always looked for what I can share with other people, especially the first time I meet them, and this has worked well for me. I have seen other people looking for what they can dislike in people they meet, and have always felt that their lives are poorer for that.
For the first time, I learned to enjoy water even though, when I first arrived, I could not swim. I taught myself to float on the beach below Betsy’s and eventually found myself swimming one day after consuming a fair amount of wine and losing my inhibitions. Another hurdle crossed! I am still not fond of water and do not swim for pleasure, but throwing a ball or Frisbee around while standing up to your waist in the warm sea has to be one of the nicer things in life. Initially I wasn’t very fond of boats (just in case they sunk), but once John had introduced me to windsurfing (where you are, more or less, attached to an unsinkable piece of plastic), my relationship with the sea and wind took off. We started windsurfing at Troulos Beach where John had the use of a “plank” belonging to a villa owner. When John was out on it, I would walk along the beach to the water sports school and ask Fotis, the owner, if I could take out one of his. He never charged me for this, perhaps reckoning that I didn’t have any money in any case, but probably working on the old Skiathos principle of, “I rub your back, you will eventually rub mine”. Mike, who had taught windsurfing for a couple of years from Koukounaries Beach, agreed to sell me his board and rig which was quite up market for that time. However, the first time I took it out, the wind was too strong for my limited technique and Mike came out in a friend’s boat to rescue me. He then jumped on the board and went screaming off yelling, “Whoopee.” However, I was hooked, and for the next 15 years or so, wind dominated our lives. The next year we went to Platanias (Aghia Paraskevi) Beach and windsurfed from there but the wind was off shore, and when it got quite strong, we would have great trouble getting back in. Once, I was sitting on my board in despair as the wind had blown me out to the level of Vromolimnos Beach (from where it was really quite difficult to get back) when this blond haired German went screaming past me on his windsurfer. When he next came by, I shouted, “I can’t get back.” To which he shouted back, “I broke my verdammt best board!” When the wind started to blow as John and I were working in the garden, it would be a mad rush to get to the beach before it dropped (which it usually started to do from 13:00 onwards). Lida would sigh but get the girls ready and we would be off as soon as everything (or most things) were picked. John and I kept our boards under a pine tree next to the taverna at Vromolimnos Beach that year as the wind was cross shore and at least we didn’t have to struggle so hard to get back. We had also become a bit more proficient but were still in the learning stage. One day, around 14:30 after we had had an excellent strong but steady wind, the German guy turned up at the beach with a sail over his shoulder. He and his family had been on the ferry from Volos when the wind was good but now it had died down as per normal. He dumped the sail on the sand with a sigh and I thought, “Here’s a man I can understand.” I began to talk to him and we hit it off immediately and he subsequently became my main windsurf guru. Wolfgang was a judge and his wife, Ulli, was a French teacher, so they got good long holidays and came every year for 4 weeks with their son and daughter. I followed him around on my old fashioned “plank” and learned a lot by watching his technique and then asking questions. This is the way I have learned everything, by watching, doing, making mistakes and eventually learning to get it right. School was a complete waste of my time – learning something by rote to get past exams was an anathema to me. Every summer, at the end of Wolfgang’s holidays, I would buy some of his windsurfing gear so that I could advance a step or two. Better and bigger sails, smaller and shorter boards were haggled over until mutually satisfactory prices were reached. I never had much money to invest but he was always keen to move on to the latest gear, so we usually managed get an agreement. Eventually we moved from Vromolimnos to Banana Beach where the wind was cross shore, blew clean (no headlands to disturb it), and where there were waves! Wolfgang was always better than me (in fact his son, Nicki, surpassed me when he was still a teenager), but we always had tons of fun. Angelis, who ran the water sports concession and was also a lover of windsurfing, tells me that he will never forget passing me in the opposite direction one day when I screamed out, “This is the life!!”.

I came comparatively late to windsurfing, I was already close to 40, so I never became one of those kids leaping into the air with their boards and performing somersaults and the like. I was happy if I could get the board to just hop out of the water for a second or two. But I derived huge amounts of pleasure in going out in winds that kept most motorboats, ski jets and the like in harbor, and scudding across the water and hopping off the wave tops. John, who was at that time was my partner in the garden, and I both became windsurfing fanatics. If a good strong breeze got up while we were picking vegetables, or weeding, or watering, in the garden, it would be down tools and off to the beach. Fun was more important than earning a living!

I also enjoyed sailing and when given the opportunity, would go out with anyone who needed a crew. John (another John, Irini’s husband) had bought a solid 4.5 metre sailing boat for himself, and so his kids, Alexis and Phaedra could learn to sail. We made a deal that I would look after it, put it in and out of the water at the beginning and end of the season, and have the use of it when he didn’t need it.

I had done some sailing, but this boat taught me a lot, and was the first boat that gave me enough confidence to go out alone with. With windsurfing, you learn to understand the wind on the water, but a sailing boat is quite a bit more complicated.
Eventually, I had to give up windsurfing as it is a sport for young, agile bodies (you need to dance on a board) and mine was no longer like that. At the time that my parents died, we looked at the possibility of buying a sailing boat. Nothing big, just something that you could sail to the mainland, or Skopelos, and back, in a day. I had always liked the idea of a catamaran as, coming from windsurfing, it seemed a waste of energy for a boat to heel over, thus losing power. On the windsurfer, when a gust came along, you simply sheeted in and went faster, so I wanted a boat that you could do something similar with. Obviously a catamaran, but one that you could sleep (or camp) on. There were no catamarans for sale in Greece in the size I wanted so I went to the UK that winter to see what was available. I had been in touch with a broker on the South coast, but I didn’t like everything he showed me. After returning to his office I was ready to give up, when a young English couple, Chris and Philippa, came in and said that they had a catamaran for sale. I said, let’s have a look at it. It was quite many miles away, but they agreed to take me then and there as I explained that my time in UK was limited. As soon as I saw it, it seemed to be just what I was looking for. It was almost 8 meters long, and a non-standard, 5 meters wide, based on a Woods design, and called “Merlin”.

Apparently, the couple who first built it had asked Woods if they could put a taller mast on it, and Woods said yes, as long as you make it a bit wider to compensate. My problem was that it was in the UK, and I needed it in Greece. So, I suggested that I would buy it at the price they were asking, if they were willing to take it apart, put it in a container to Greece, and come out and help me put it together again. I said that they could stay in one of our houses, and once it was back together again, then they could take it off for some days, sailing around the beautiful Sporades Islands. They jumped at this offer and we went back to the broker to do the paperwork. In the spring, the container arrived in Pireaus and I went down to collect it. I had to pay some import duty (and a lot of bribes) but a specialist company at the port arranged all that for me, so my hands were not dirty! I just had to keep shelling out one thousand Drachma notes! We put the container on a lorry for Volos, and set out. I have never been so frightened in my life! The driver just kept his foot all the way down, going past every other lorry on the road and only stopping to pay the tolls. I was so happy to arrive in the Volos boat yard in one piece. In the meantime, Chris and Philippa had flown out to Skiathos and taken the ferry for Volos. They met us at the boatyard, and with the help of the driver and his mate, we unloaded the container. There was some slight damage to the side of one hull, nothing really major, but the mast has been damaged a bit and part of it needed welding. Finding someone who could weld aluminium in Volos was not easy, but eventually I managed to get someone to do it. Chris and Philippa had labelled everything when they took the boat apart, and this proved invaluable when re-assembling it. The most difficult thing was to step the mast as it was very long and lots of power and leverage was necessary to get it up. Chris said that they had originally winched it into position using the topping lift and the spinnaker halyard, once it had been propped up at a sufficient angle to get some leverage. The three men who ran the yard said they could do it with a long rope pulling at a shallow angle, so I went with their idea. Well, they got it up about halfway, with me and Chris guiding it from underneath, when one of them lost his grip on the rope, and the other two, realizing that they could not hold it, just let go! The mast came crashing down, grazing Chris’s shoulder and damaging the track a bit. Chris was livid, and it took all my tact to get him to come back to try again. This time we used his method without any problem and finally had the boat assembled. To launch the boat, we had two trolleys that fit under each hull, made from angle iron and glass fiber. It was fairly easy to maneuver it on the trollies, so we pushed the boat down the launch ramp ourselves. Chris would have nothing to do with the yard workers by then! After it was bobbing on the water, we took the trollies apart and put them on the netting at the front to transport them to Skiathos. After two nights, we arrived at my mooring at Sklithri Beach. Chris and Philippa sailed off into the sunset, and returned 4 days later having had one good last trip with Merlin.

We had many years of fun, sailing her all around the offshore islands, Skopelos, and the mainland, and I even started doing day sailing trips with her (long before all the yachts who are now doing it on the Skiathos New Harbour). She was a great sailing boat, and given a fresh wind, she would go like the clappers. She was a safe boat, and we often went with 6 to 8 people for trips. With her dagger boards withdrawn, she had hardly any draft which meant we could get into small bays and pull up to beaches where normal sailboats couldn’t go. The one problem with her was her width. When we wanted to take her onshore for the winter and the yearly maintenance, it was hard to find a place to pull her out, and even harder to find somewhere we could keep her for 6 months. We kept her in several places onshore over the years, but we never had a specific place. The last time we took her out of the water was at Koukounaries Harbour, where the ramp was just wide enough to take her. Unfortunately, there were high tension electric cables running across the car park area where I wanted to leave her. We managed to pass under them, and we winterized her and left her until spring. After the usual maintenance in the spring (painting, etc.) Jacques and I with several friends started to push her back towards the ramp. The VHF aerial on the top of the mast touched the cables (or got close enough to them for the electricity to arc) and 22,000 volts(!) came down the mast. Whether we took a different line, or the cables had sagged a bit with the very warm spring we had that year, no one knows. Only Jacques and I were holding anything metal, and that was an aluminium cross member, but we both got bad electric shocks. Jacques about a third, and me about two thirds. I think if it was only one of us, he would be dead, but fortunately we shared the damage. We both had burns but the worst damage was in our feet where the electricity grounded itself. Jacques toes were burned, but they recovered. I was helicoptered to a hospital in Athens and eventually two of my toes had to be amputated. I spent 7 weeks in hospital and Lida was flying back and forth to Athens twice a week, trying to tend to me and run the villa letting at the same time. However, we all survived, and can only thank the gods for that. That episode was not so much fun! We hadn’t used Merlin that much in the last few years, and this accident made me decide that it was time to sell her and move on. We had less time in general (as I was working quite hard as a real estate broker throughout the summer) and thought that a motor boat would suit us better, because we could get more quickly to the places we liked. A friend of ours from Volos, Dimitris, had always said that he would like to buy Merlin if I ever wanted to sell her, so I decided to take him up on his offer. We repainted her (she had been left in the car park for a couple of years), got her under the cables (with the mast down this time), launched her, and Dimitris and I with some friends, sailed her to Milina (half way to Volos) where Dimitri intended to keep her. I said my sad farewells to her and Dimitri drove me to Kadi Yiorgi where Jacques came with his motor boat to pick me up. We had a meal and some wine there and then came back to Skiathos.
The following year, I bought a RIB from Eric, a good Dutch friend of ours, as he wanted to get a bigger one. It was 6.5 meters and had a huge 225 HP engine on the back. It was a bigger engine than I wanted, but it was also nice to have some reserve power just in case it was needed. With this, we could get to the places we liked to go within a half hour, an hour at the most, so we had more possibilities even though I had less time. It was called a Joker Boat, made in Italy, and as I liked the name “Joker”, that was what it became. I like to joke and laugh, so it seemed appropriate.