We left the islands of the Northern Sporades and crossed the strait to the mainland. With the promise of good chandleries in Volos, Greece's fifth largest city, we had decided to divert from our southward path so that we could tie to the quay and do some routine maintenance. Once into the Trikeri Channel we turned north into the Gulf of Volos passing a huge marble quarry on the way. We chose Ormos Pigadhi as an intermediate anchorage largely because the tower on the hill over the town is called 'Achilles' Tower' and it is said to be the bay from which Achilles set sail for Troy. We thought the tower was rather disappointing, but we had good shelter for the night and found the town charming. Caroline also used the opportunity to do some clothes washing.
It was very hot and still as we motored north towards Volos the next day, and shortly after we took this picture, we turned the motor off and drifted while we swam and cooled off.
On reaching Volos, we found a place on the breakwater and 'med moored' - dropping the anchor several boat-lengths out and then reversed back, tying to the quay with two stern lines. We far prefer to swing at anchor and this was only the third time we had tied up this way since leaving Kusadasi in April, first for one night before we entered the Dardanelles and then for two nights in Erdek in the Sea of Marmara. In that time we have also not been into a marina. How lucky we are to have a large bank of solar panels and a water-maker! We were quite pleased that we had somehow missed being hailed by Carlos, the 'unofficial harbourmaster' who manages, for a price, some of the privately owned moorings with electricity and water on the town quay while their owners are away in their boats. The town quay backs on to many tavernas and bars. We developed quite a friendship with Carlos over the two weeks and he'd often arrive at our stern to chat - or vent his frustrations.
The main job that we wanted to do while in Volos was to clean out the fuel tank. Bill had found found that the fuel in the filter was discoloured. We are not sure whether the black colour came from fresh microbial growth that had occurred in the tank this season, or whether a few rough passages had stirred up old gunk on the bottom of the tank. Interestingly, the engine had been running well with no smoke in the exhaust despite the state of the fuel. Diesel engines are remarkably resilient things - and Perkins engines seem to be at the robust end of diesel engines. It may have not been a problem keeping the discoloured fuel (something that fellow cruiser Paul of Ganova, later told us that he believed to the extent that he would have been willing to take the dirty fuel to use in his boat), but we decided to get rid of it. The next problem is where to dispose of 80 litres of dirty fuel without polluting. Bill spent a day tracking down the solution, with the steps going something like this (leaving out the misunderstandings due to Bill's lack of Greek and the delays due to the fact that the first person he asked had to find the person who speaks some English):
- Carlos: "Try the BP station, I think they have a recycling tank".
- BP station: "No, we can't take it, try the Elin marine refueling depot. They might have something."
- Elin depot: "No, we have nothing like that. See if a fisherman might like it - they put anything through their engines."
- Fisherman (actually the son of the third fisherman Bill approached, because he was the one who spoke English): "Let's see if we can help you. No, we don't have any way of getting fuel out of our tank to top up that bottle of fuel sample you have shown me. Oh, you want us to take that fuel! I don't think so - it is dirty. We wouldn't want to put that in our tanks."
At this stage Bill went to the Port Police (aka Coast Guard). He eventually went to the man in the crisp white uniform on the top floor who, with the help of his young, female assistant and much discussion he worked out what we wanted and contacted a company that deals in waste. "They will be waiting by the quay with empty cans to collect your fuel." At this stage it was clear that he thought he had done all he needed to do, so Bill didn't get the option of delaying the pickup due to the fact that the fuel was still in our tank and not able to be picked up.So back to the boat where fortunately Carlos was chatting to Caro. He accompanied Bill to the meeting point and with his help with Greek they were able to negotiate a pickup the following day - when there was a chance the fuel would be out of the tank and in their containers.
We had already tested the extraction system - using a hand-operated oil extractor pump attached to the hose normally used to fill the diesel room heater's tank. It was slow, but it worked. (Before we settled on this system Bill had needed to check there wasn't a removable plate on the fuel tank for easier access - and that had involved pulling apart one of the aft cabins and poking a camera into lots of places trying to find what turned out to be a non-existant plate). The next challenge was to agitate the tank as we were draining it so that the gunge stayed in suspension. The solution was to create a rough passage at the quay. Bill untied the main halyard from the top of the mainsail, lengthened it and took it ashore. Then, while Caroline braced herself and pumped out the fuel in the boat, Bill repeatedly pulled on the main halyard - so pulling the top of the mast sideways - to rock the boat. The tank was eventually emptied. To check what sort of job we had done we put another 5 litres of fuel into the tank, gave it a good rocking to suspend any crap that was left in the tank, and then pumped it out again. Amazingly that fuel had very little sediment in it - coming out looking not much different to the bright transparent yellowish-green fuel that had gone in. We had a bit over eighty litres of fuel sitting in jerry cans when the liquid wasted disposal guys arrived. We then renewed all the fuel filters on the boat, put some new fuel in the tank, sorted out an air leak that had developed in the fuel lines during all these operations, and cranked up the engine. She ran beautifully.
Volos was a port for leaks. While we were there we discovered water in the bilge. It tasted fresh so we knew it was coming from our freshwater system. After some detective work that involved opening up lots of hatches and taking lots of stuff out of cupboards to see the hoses in the compartments and check for water at their bottoms we concluded the water was coming from the hot water system - somewhere. We won't go into details here but suffice it to say that the hot water system is jammed under the nav station seat with lots of pipes and wires coming out of it and there is no room to get hands in there to do anything much. In the end we took the whole thing out (which involved inventing a new ratchet/socket/universal jointed/screw driver) cleaned it up and put it back, retightening all the hose clamps securely and adding a tap to isolate the whole thing if the leak wasn't fixed. And it wasn't. So Billabong currently has its hot water system isolated waiting for more attention when we get some time.
Other jobs we got done in Volos were to change engine oil and oil filter, change the prefilter in the watermaker, fill the water tanks a number of times (carting jerry cans from the main town quay), and sorting out our cooking gas situation. We decided to convert from Australian/USA to European gas bottles. While the system of decanting into our gas bottles usually worked well, it was a bit of a hassle at times. There was a hardware store in Volos that specialized in plumbing (water and gas) and so we easily got all the fittings we needed for the conversion.
Meanwhile, Caroline started on her list - mostly washing and reprovisioning. Bill had stumbled upon a coin operated self-service laundromat on one of his bike rides around town looking for the promised three chandleries. Caroline was restricted to how much she could do in one trip by what would fit in the shopping trolley and how much pegging out space was on the boat. In the end eight loads in four separate trips were done, and even the cockpit cushions and our polar fleece blankets got washed. With good supermarkets (Lidl, Carrefour, AB) in town we stocked up with non-perishables to last until we were back in Turkey. Six weeks worth of UHT milk, beer, tonic and toilet paper is bulky and entailed several trips! Then there was all the rest........
We were roused from our afternoon snooze (what else to do when even reading a book raises a sweat) in the cockpit one day by the arrival of the New Zealand boat Manaia with Jamie and Renee aboard. We thoroughly enjoyed their company for a few days, sharing stories, recipes, drinks and a meal on each other's boats. Renee and Caroline also spent time in the laudromat together. Knowing that we were there one afternoon, Bill dropped in as he was passing on one of his missions - with icecreams.. 'You'd better not tell Jamie about this' said Renee and we found out later that Bill had gone back and reported mischievously 'that they were not sitting in airconditioned comfort in the laundry eating icecreams'!
We had a storm and a couple of big blows here. The storm came at about 10 pm one night and the winds swung from 40 kts from the south, to 30 kts from the north in about 10 minutes. We had a worrying time until the unattended yacht next to us whose anchor was not holding, was secured - thanks mostly to Bill. We ended up with a cobweb of extra lines to keep everyone safe, and extra fenders on the stern of the loose boat which nevertheless sustained some damage as it ground against the rough concrete quay.
The kilometre long breakwater is a very sociable place. Before late afternoon most users are fishermen, often dads with little boys, but after that it becomes very busy with families, couples and groups out strolling. By 2 am it's mostly teenagers having a good (and noisy) time. One evening a bride and groom and their photographer walked past. Another morning, two blokes in very Australian training-type gear came along. They were in Volos for the World Championship Water Polo and they were coachs for the under-20 team. One of them was even from Fremantle and we found we had some mutual friends. Small world!
From our vantage point on the breakwater we were well entertained. Several other cruising yachts came and went from either side of us during this two weeks and as they left, all but one ended up with their anchor snagged on the heavy chain which hold the nearby floating pontoon in place. It's tactful to let crews sort it out for themselves but on several occasions, Bill donned mask and snorkel to help when all else failed. Also entertaining was this amusingly painted cruise ship which Bill saw arriving early one morning. Because of the noise, Caroline retreated below each night to sleep with her mosquito net draped around with pegs, and using the fans to keep cool.
Bill has been contributing to a cruisers' information website (www.cruiserswiki.org) this year. Coming to Volos was a bit frustrating because of the lack of information about it anywhere, so Bill had been accumulating information to put on the site. On one of our last mornings he rode our trusty pushbike up a large hill on the south-eastern edge of town to get some overview pictures of the port to accompany the text. It was a beautiful cool (relatively speaking) morning and with the help of the lowest gear on the bike he got to the top. The road ends at the Volos 'Acropolis'. To get to the best vantage point to see Volos Bill had to clamber another 300m to the western end of a ridge which was made up of a natural rocky spine and in places the remains of a narrow (2m) path constructed with very large blocks of stone. At the lookout end of the ridge were two World War 2 machine gun emplacements built on an ancient stone platform. The view from that point was terrific and has clearly been an attraction for thousands of years! In the view below of the town, Billabong is near the centre of the picture, third yacht in from the left.
On the morning of our departure Plan A was to refuel at the fueling jetty and then sail to Vathikelon, five hours away. We both knew that Murphy was lurking and was most likely to make an appearance as we raised the anchor and/or as we tried to get off the fuel jetty. As it turned out, Plan B was not needed for either situation. Our anchor was not fouled, and the southerly, which had it come in would have pinned us against the fuel jetty, was still light enough for us to use the prop-walk to take Billabong's stern away from the jetty and for us then to reverse out. We were very proud of ourselves!
