Marina di Orikum – Monday 2 July 2018

The agent was as good as his word and he turned up on the stroke of 6am to give us our paperwork to proceed. So we were off just after 6am. The weather turned out to be more or less just as predicted, at least to start with.  The sun was bright and the sea was calm.  There was little wind to start with.  Then after about an hour the wind which had been on the nose went a bit around and strengthened to 8-9knots.  So we put up the genoa to help us go along faster.  We were making nearly 6 knots which was good for about 3 hours.  We hoped that would keep up while we were on the same bearing for 20 miles, but the wind turned around and we had to just motor.

We were both very tired after an early morning start so we gave each other a 2 hour interval to have a nap. By noon the wind started to increase as predicted but it remained on the nose.  It then got much stronger going up to the expected 15-20 knots. By 2pm we were able to put the genoa up and get 6 knots speed for 2 hours before the wind died again.

When we got to the bay of Vlore we hoped the wind would ameliorate at a bit, but that is where we and the forecaster got it wrong.  We still had the genoa up and the wind increased to 17-20 knots and we were doing over 6 knots in speed.  At about 4pm the wind died.  We assumed that we were in the shelter of the islands and it would be light winds from then on, but we were wrong!

Out of nowhere the wind suddenly went up to 26 knots gusting 31!  The wind was on the beam but we put no sails up because it was very lumpy and we were supposed to be coming in to port.  At this stage I was really worried that the conditions would be so bad that we couldn’t get in to the marina.  However after about an hour of this just as suddenly as the wind got up, it went down.  There was virtually no wind (2 knots) as we entered the marina.  So we got neatly tucked up here by 5pm, which was good.

After the excitement of the near gale on entering we just flaked out for a while.  Then finally had good showers and went out to dinner.  We have booked a taxi for sight seeing tomorrow.

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