Excitement is starting to build as Tamarisk enters its final few days of repairs and we begin to plan our three day crossing from Greece to Malta. This two week halt period, as well as smaller ones in past months, have been lessons in our own human psychology. Like food and water, motion is now an essential ingredient for our survival…. its absence for us lately feels like a sort of emotional starvation that we need to deal with. That may sound incredible considering we’re parked in the middle of paradise, but we think it’s a normal human reaction when your goals become obstructed by something out of your control.

Our self prescribed treatment program has included a number of ingredients, including exploring the surrounding islands by car, ferry, bus, and scooter. Piers learned about the importance of keeping the scooter upright when he laid it down at 25mph to avoid an oncoming car. The scars on his knees and elbows will be valuable reminders during future scooter excursions. We’ve made friends with the locals and even learned a few words of Greek in the process thanks to some patient dinner time tutoring. We’ve been sailing with our neighbors and we’ve become experts on how to dine in Greece on less than three euros (hint: lots and lots of pork gyros).

We now sit on the slow ferry from Corfu island to mainland Greece as we make our way back towards Tamarisk today in Lefkas. The next couple of days will include odd jobs on the boat and (more importantly) making sure the repair guys finish their work on schedule so we can get to our important rendezvous point in Malta where our parents will join us next week. Jimmy left for his next adventure in India this morning and will try his luck with us again later once Tamarisk has established a better track record for reliability.

We’ve been quiet lately for a reason. We made it back to Tamarisk and tried to make a beeline from Lefkas, Greece to Malta, but quickly realized we had electrical problems that would make our three-day passage risky. So we turned around and put the boat on the dock for repairs that will include removing the engine, reconfiguring the electrical charging system, and replacing all the batteries, among other things. It’s our last chance to get inexpensive boat work done before we cross the Atlantic Ocean and, given the distance we’re about to go with this boat, we’d be stupid to leave here without cleaning things up. But it also means we’re “stuck” in Lefkas for a couple of weeks that we weren’t expecting.

As our friend Jackie reminds us, “I can think of worse places to be stuck”. We know she’s 100% right about that, so we’ve spent the past couple of days exploring all corners of the island by rental car. There is no such thing as being stuck here – you could literally spend a lifetime in these islands and still not have time to see it all, let alone get bored. Porto Katsiki Beach on the west side of the island with its stunning white cliffs and bright turquoise water is just one example of a paradise here that seems more fictional than real even when you’re standing right there on the white sand.

The unfortunate part about our current delay (other than the repair bill) is that our friend Jimmy from the Black Sea Run has joined us for a few weeks of sailing around the Med, which is now on rain check while Tamarisk is disabled. So today we’re off for a day of sailing with our new friend Gabriel who’s parked next to us and wants to make sure Jimmy gets to do some sailing, and make sure Piers and I don’t get too lazy… so gotta run now!

We had to face reality one of these days, and that day came on Sunday. We’ve been falling more and more behind our original schedule and found ourselves questioning whether it was realistic to make it up the Adriatic into Croatia before heading further west towards Italy. If we left it another week, we would probably need to skip the Adriatic and head directly west. But on Sunday we woke up at dawn and set out to save our Adriatic visit by making back lost days. We headed north for the Corinth Canal which would save us 3 days of sailing around the bottom of Greece (while costing us around $500), and we decided to sail all the way through the night to earn back another day. This is the pace we’ve kept for the past couple of days, and is similar to what we’ll be doing for the next three or four days to put us back on schedule.

One may think that 30 hours of non-stop sailing might be tedious and boring, but one would be wrong. The passage from Hydra on the Aegean side of Greece to Kefallinia on the Ionian side was fantastic. You get to see 15 or 20 islands as you weave your way towards the canal and you even get a glimpse at Athens off in the distance. The Canal runs 3.5 miles long and is cut into limestone that towers 79 meters on either side. It’s so narrow that traffic is only permitted in one direction at a time, so you wait at the canal entrance for the signal to proceed, then go blasting through at full speed to stop the canal officials from yelling at you. It’s so narrow that you’d never believe huge tanker ships can transit through safely without hitting the walls, but somehow they do.

After transiting the canal you enter an enormous bay, you look around and you immediately notice that everything is different on this side of Greece. The cities are bigger, the resorts are towering, the sea is flat as a pancake, the winds are tame, the distances between land masses are huge, the temperature is warmer, the land is greener, and there are almost no boats anywhere. The canal literally connects two entirely different Greek worlds.

Sailing through the night requires us to take shifts, which we did for four hours each. The person on watch has enormous responsibility – just one mistake and the ship could be on the shore or splintered by a freighter. This means you’re religious about watching the nav screens and the radar, listening out for radio traffic, and scanning the horizon for ship lights coming your way (a task made difficult by the city lights in the background). But you also have time to enjoy the peacefulness of being alone at sea without any distractions. You notice miniscule changes in the wind, you hear new sounds from the water moving against the hull you never noticed before, and you’re aware of the first hint of light in the pre-dawn hours. You feel completely in touch with your surroundings and for some reason you keep getting a peculiar but tranquil thought in your head that can’t really be put into words, but is definitely related to “nothing else matters”.