Nick

The first few days were incredibly full and stressful. We’re seriously wondering whether we’re made for this kind of life, or whether we should come up with a different plan.

Down in the valley, on the one hand, we have the long-distance sailing community, who take us in and reassure us. There’s Ralph from Bavaria, for example, who is moored next to us with his BroadBlue 385 and spends half the year in Greece with his wife. There’s Dave, who helps us with the sails, as I mentioned in the previous blog post. And then there are all the small everyday encounters: Charly has a scratch on his eye and Alex goes to the vet we already visited in spring. He is absolutely over the moon to see Charly again. He refuses to take any fee and even gives us some Gagisäckli.

What also lifts our spirits is a Leopard 39 moored at our pier: besides our broken sail, another reason why we’re back in Lefkas. The Leopard 39 belongs to an older couple from Australia and is for sale. On paper it is in perfect condition, the price is exactly within our budget, and by now the size also seems reasonable to us. We arranged a viewing with the broker Nick, and the boat lives up to what it promises. The owners seem almost a little too attached to their boat, but apparently, because of their age, they simply can’t manage it anymore and have to sell. Nick doesn’t seem to have an easy task there.

And so we decide, more or less on the spur of the moment, to make an offer on the boat. Strictly speaking, we don’t even need a boat right now, but opportunities like this don’t come along every day, because a well-kept catamaran from a good yard and in an owner’s version is not exactly ten a penny in the Mediterranean within our budget. Nick already knows our expert Johannes, and the two clearly get along well.

And sure enough, we get the nod and have almost bought a boat!

The next step is for us to pay a 10% deposit. Then Johannes will come and do an extensive test of the boat on land and in the water, at our expense. If substantial damage turns up, we’ll renegotiate. So the risk is manageable.

I only have exterior photos of the boat, since it was still fully lived in during the viewing.

Then Alex and Tom arrive on Saturday evening, and we hope the sail will also be repaired by then so that next week we can actually go sailing instead of just managing things. So far, at any rate, we still haven’t got any holiday feeling.

*This blog post has been automatically translated by a Large Language Model.