The great escape!
By: Mat
Now it is July 4 and we must be out of the country by July 14 at a maximum!!! Exceeding the 90-day Schengen zone is dangerous. It could even lead to getting banned!?!?! And we still have more than 230 nm ahead of us (almost double what we just did in less time). This means we have to Book it FAST! So as soon as we dropped our friend to the bus we went back to the boat, cleaned the boat and prepared for our first 2 full days at sea. We are planning a 4h shift rotation so it's manageable at night. How it goes is: Good breakfast, planning for a few snacks for the first day that is easy to do (leftover), and then all goes random for the second day. We did cook a few times, but it depends a lot on the sea state.
First, we had to say bye to the fake Rocher Percé! So we squeeze between it in a tight exit to avoid a 20 min detour.
We left mid-day and we did a good distance, but the first night shift was super strange. It was the first time we sail at night. And as soon as Cesine went to bed the wind started to curl... and curl... die, and pick up again. This and every time you do something at night and cannot see anything since we had a black moon every sound is creepy and amplified 100-fold. But after taking it a few times, the wind had died so it was time to burn Dinosaur. We do go slow so we only burn around 2L/h for a small 4N/h. The shaft being slightly damaged does worry us so we try not to force anything. The worst thing at night is that the wind is gone, but the waves still exist and rock sideways sometimes.
You know I just mentioned that every sound makes us worry now since we used the engine a lot recently to make the distance? To avoid future problems we did add an extra round anode on the shaft. That way if it fails, it won't get out of the boat this time. Well during the night I kept hearing a tuc tuc tuc tuc...... pause, tuc tuc tuc tuc...... pause, tuc tuc tuc tuc...... pause, so my brain thought that the anode that got loose and is now rubbing on the chair. So when we saw a bay, we stopped mid-water and while drifting I looked under the boat. We got lucky and it seems that it was nothing, so we kept going.
It was the first time Cesine saw a clear definition between slow and high wind on the Sea. We did good and we closed most of the sails in preparation for that wind gust that we saw in the distance. We felt it hit, it was crazy but at least we now have wind and strong wind again so we sell the rest of the day to the other island. We could clearly see the wind twist around the island and how it just curved and helped us sometimes or annoy us other times.
The second day was a bit harder since we are now more tired. I took the evening shift till 2-3 in the morning and Cesine woke up and did the morning sunrise again. When went to bed in the early morning, I saw a group of 10-15 dolphins just passing by for 1-2 min... so again I was the only one seeing dolphins (1 in the middle of the night and the other at 7 am).
There was a super large bay with a few boats and a large marina in construction, so we stopped in the bay (since we are cheap) and we hate backing a sailboat since we have no bow thrusters. What we didn't know was that this baby is famous for katabatic wind and therefore windsurfing wind sailing and anything that involves small craft with wind for recreational activity. So we had a lot of activity around the boat, it was fun and also nerve-racking to watch.
Next: Corfu in another 2-day sail!
The plan this time was to wake up early, motor out of the bay while we cook breakfast and once we're outside the mountain range we can put the sail up if there's wind and sail for two days straight to Corfu. We had another day of typical Mediterranean wind, which means a lot of wind... and then dead calm... and then a bit of wind... and then perfect wind... and then a storm at night. The storm wind was exactly in front of us and we did no distance in 4h... so because of that, we decided... "fuck it"!!! We decided to change course and anchor in the middle of the night in Anchorage which we'd never been to before. Anchoring during the day is complicated but then anchoring at night is such another level!!! We use a massive flashlight to light up some of the boats since we could not figure out the distance and because we don't wanna run into anybody. We found a spot, we anchored and we prayed that nothing would be bad by the morning. The problem in a Bay with no winds is that you have no idea where the anchor is!!! It could be 90° from the boat but there's no way of knowing since all boats rotate randomly (or at least do not extend their chain). We were lucky this time.
Next: Corfu... right?
We are now half a day away from Corfu, so we should make it 🤣. We had an early morning and did indeed reach it by going really close to Albania on a few tacks. We even made it a few days early so we anchored in a massive bay with soooooo many other boats. But it was an easy large bay. We did Shopping, visiting & stuff even if Cesine was slightly injured. (another post).
Checkout and go, easy peasy... right?
We're not the only ones who just want to check out of the country by boat. It's not the most obvious or common exit in a boat, but a lot of people do it over and over when in Europe after all. And we chose a marina that could in theory handle the Shengen exit. Because we're both Canadian and we bought the boat in Greece we learned that we have to present our sailboat nationality first which is Polish and then present both passports if we don't wanna pay any tax. We cannot exit the country by that location so we had to: rent a car on short notice, go to the Main city (Port of entry/border) exit the country, and then come back to the marina and exit the country.
We did the math right... Right???
We kept an excel sheet of all the entries and exits of the Schengen zone since we know we have a maximum of 90 days. And at that date Cesine I had 88 days in total so we were good up to 2 days in advance!!! no problem! The problem happened when they started calculating and they said the exit date also counts, so we have an error on our Excel sheet which means we were not two days extra... but two days extra!?! 😭😭😭. Let's just say we had a bit of panic at the border control, but the guy was really nice and understanding that we arrived in a sailboat!?! So he just asked us to exit the country which we were planning already. Hopefully, there are no other consequences in the future.
The Final Exit
The weather was predicted to be kind of rough, but manageable, and we had no choice... so we decided to just head back to the boat straight, pack our shit and leave!!! The problem is the weather was kind of rough, but we were protected by mountains so we had a heavy wind but no heavy sea state... yet!!! We zigzagged our way outside of Corfu and towards Albania in a strong beam reach, it was Glorious and fast!!! When we hit the Albanian channel it was a whole other problem because now we were against the wind in a strong Sea state (no mountain blocking the waves building up from Italy). We are talking of 3m waves with 30-35kn of wind against us!!! We again made little distance and tried to avoid fishing nets it was not a pleasant evening, all that while we were deploying at my work in production and we had a production error, so I had to spend a few hours on and off downstairs debugging the stuff. On top of this, we almost rammed another sailboat that was motoring without anyone at the helm on autopilot!?!?! Let's just say timeline and sailboat are the worst enemies 😡🤬.
