Someone stole our dinghy engine.
Well, that’s the story at least. Iggy and Mitch were out late driving around in circles with some boobies and the next thing we know it’s the morning and our dinghy has no engine.
We’re blaming it on a boat of dirty Spaniards who hate us. They have this amazingly awesome black wood deck boat and they think they are better than us. Regardless of the fact that they might be, we instantly hate them. And the rumor on the sea (see how I did that? Rumor on the streets, rumor on the sea.. HA) is that it was the dirty Spaniards with their evil black boat.
In addition, our dinghy is also flat. That is likely the fault of Iggy and Mitch, but not a huge issue as we have a repair kit and it was relatively unavoidable with the amount of ropes, anchors and crap sticking in every direction the night before.
We make plans to meet up with Phillip and the Spaniards we actually like in a small bay for the day since the actual sail to Plaka (Πλάκα) is pretty quick today. Because all of the Swedish skippers seem to be on the same wavelength, somehow we ended up with 7 boats in the bay hanging out, swimming and drinking. It was a good group of Americans, Spanish, Brits, Swedes and French and we had a great time. There was some snorkeling nearby and some good cliffs for diving. There was a gorgeous beach where people started to show up and, I’m sure, marvel at our amazing yachts and be so jealous that they weren’t out on the water.
Then these two giant super yachts showed up with their own staffs and dinghies bigger than our boats. They both had jet skies where one of the skippers would jump off to go help tie the things to the cliffs to keep them from drifting back out to sea. It looked like they could have pulled the rocks off the cliff and dragged it to the next island.
After we’d had our fill, we decided to leave first to attempt to get a good spot in Plaka (back on the mainland). Even tho we arrived relatively early, we still were way later than most of the other people and we got a shite spot second to last on the second row. What that meant is that we had to climb over about 8 boats to get to the shore. Fine at 5 PM, not so fine at 5 AM.
We had about 4 hours before dinner so we decided to do a little exploring. We walked over to town, got some groceries, hung out on a man-made beach and got a snack at a local restaurant.
The waiter at this restaurant was fracking hilarious. He spoke a little English, but he thought that the proper response to any question involved a combination of the words “sorry”, “please”, and “thank you”. “Do you have stuffed grape leaves?” “Please, please, yes, of course, thank you.” “Excuse me, can I please get another beer?” “Sorry, please, thank you, yes, please, yes.” He was so excited all the time to serve us, to show us where the bathroom was, to get us more bread. Then you would see him run downstairs and yell at his daughter who was setting up tables outside but who obviously wasn’t doing it right (he screams as he hits her on the side of the head for not being perfect enough). We loved this guy.
TYW had set up a dinner for us that was one long table where all 250 or so of us sat. It was right on the pier overlooking the bay, all of our boats and the little pebble beach. We had our normal Greek meal options but in addition, they served this amazing cheesy dip that tasted EXACTLY like this dip called heroine dip that one of my best friends in high school’s mom used to make for us. It was sooooo yummy! In addition, this restaurant made it way too easy to steal wine as they put a 2 liter plastic water bottle full of it about every 4 people. So we stole and then proceeded to go back and make our first round of Gypsy juice on the sea wall overlooking all of our boats.
The club we had set up for that night was pretty awesome. It was a three story night club (why on earth this really cool clubs exist in these towns with populations of less than 1000, I don’t know, but they do). This club was obviously built into the side of this cliff and had glass floors in several places which showed the rock cliffs underneath as well as in several places you could look down at the people dancing in the level below you.
Because we obviously hadn’t had enough of it yet, we spent most of this night jumping around dancing to the normal American mix Euro-pop rap scene the DJ mixed up. For respite, there was a really cool open air terrace at the top of this club where you could go up for air, a bit of a cool down and a bit quicker access to the bar.