We are 10 days into our stay in Panormitis, it's been very quiet and relaxing, only disturbed by the sounds of goats, birds and the monastery bells. The most exciting thing to happen has been errr, umm....... That describes the level of tranquility!
The weather has been lovely, barring a couple of really cold days and two days of rain. Yesterday was the first shorts and t shirt day, soon be swimming time! We have been walking around the bay, discovering a cafe in the monastery generally doing minor jobs on the boat. One of those, has been to research how to measure the blackwater tank level. We have no means of checking this but it must be nearly full and will require us to leave the bay for another destination or at least have a long sail out. A solution has been found and we now need to find a way to get hold of the parts.
It's baby goat season
Nigel had to contact Mastervolt support when our battery capacity only increased to 86% from 82% after 6 hrs use of the generator. Swapping messages on WhatsApp with a nice chap from Corfu eventually resulted in him remotely accessing our systems through Nigels laptop. Cue nervous checking of bank account status!! All was well and the issue was solved by fully isolating the batteries from the boat for 10 seconds and reconnecting, an action more commonly known as a windows reset! Apparently over time the "shunt has a tendency to drift". You'll have to look it up, We have no idea. The batteries were full even though the display wasn't showing 100%.
We have decided to head for a small, fairly non descript island by Greek standards, called Tilos, tomorrow. It's 23 miles away, 100 winter inhabitants (500 summer) with a small harbour. Hopefully we can fill our water tanks there, as we have only around 230 ltrs left of our 600 ltrs storage capacity.
We need to get to a sailing centre (Kos) with chandlerys at some point to replace our genoa sheet, we are using a spinnaker sheet for now, and replace our anchor bridle. The one we have is 3 plait and twists the chain as its loaded and unloaded. It's a little noisy for us in the front cabin if the wind is blowing. Apparently the answer is 8 strand octoplait, we shall see. Kos marina appears to be constantly full, being a charter base, so we may have to anchor in the bay and dinghy ashore to get those parts. The anchorage isn't well protected as far as we can see so we will need to time it well.
We will tell you how we get on in Tilos in our next blog.
