Executive summary, for those who are short of time: another big step forward this week: we made it into the water and moved onto Opua! We were temporarily joyous. And then Customs made it clear to us that they were aware of our vehicle and we would face a big fine if we were to leave it in Kos as planned until November, so we decided to bring it back to Germany right now. We will start again with a clean slate: boat in the water, and no big fine threatening.
Things started to come together this week so that all works that had to be done on dry land had largely been completed, including the sanding, polishing and anti-fouling, as well as some of the other outstanding tasks, so we just had to see whether the marina team would be able to return Opua to the water this week. They said they could, and would, and we should expect this to happen some time on Friday.
Full of anticipation we hurried down to the dry dock at 8:00am on Friday to get everything ready. There had been a major storm with heavy rain the previous night, so Opua needed a good old wipe down. The dinghy needed a second coat of anti-fouling paint before being lifted back onto the boat. After tidying up the cockpit, and preparing the fenders and lines, we were ready for lift-in! Ralph managed to collar the manager of the boatyard to get an approximate timing of about 10:30.
At this point we could have waited on tenterhooks for the operation to start. But we have now been here for 6 weeks and we know that waiting on tenterhooks is mostly inadvisable. A big waste of nervous energy and a real pain in the behind. So instead, we cleared out our remaining stuff from the vacation apartment and fed the last tidbits to Rosa, the ancient, unkempt, cloudy-eyed and irresistible mongrel with the insatiable need for affection.
Eventually at about one o’clock that big old crane came to get us. Same operation as last time, only backwards, logically, and Opua was lifted onto wide straps and wheeled out to the slip. We hopped on - yes, me too! Crewmember number 1 – and Ralph manoeuvred us backwards out of the slip. Then we motored round the marina wall and into our designated spot right next to our friends Claudia and Thomas in the wondrous Kaimiloa. I cannot begin to tell you how joyful and relieved we felt. And although we did not smash the bottle on Opua’s flanks to celebrate, it definitely felt appropriate to raise a toast with a small glass of prosecco.
Another event from this week was that, amusingly, the customs office had already clocked us and knew exactly which our car was. We realised, in retrospect, that it must have been quite conspicuous as the only German-registered, significantly hail-damaged black VW multivan driving round Kos for the last 6 weeks! After weighing up all options we chose to drive back to Germany now before we actually have set sail, to avoid any difficulties in the next few months when we should be sailing, and further north than Kos.
A Spoony without a road vehicle is like a bicycle without wheels so when we return to Kos from our mini -break in Germany, we may feel a little forlorn. But not for long! Because when we are sailing we won’t need a car. We will return after our trip to our well-stocked and soon to be wonderfully organised boat and hope that everything is in absolutely tip-top order, including those pesky things that keep cropping up (a dear friend told me this is all part of the cool adventure, just a question of perspective. I am still working on this) and that we can start…sailing! I am not waiting uselessly on tenterhooks. I am practising my knots.
Translated to German with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) - with some tweaks
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