Tuesday 22 September 2015

Tuesday 22 September 2015 – Lipsi

Well we are still here in Lipsi.  Rather like Ulysses we are detained here longer than we hoped.  Yesterday was warm and sunny.  The forecast rain from 6pm onwards didn’t materialise.  We took an umbrella to the restaurant, just in case, and were the only ones to do so.  The bad weather didn’t arrive until about 5:30 this morning when we had a thunderstorm with huge amounts of lightening but very little thunder.  We do not know if it was a Sirocco as suggested by one of the mooring men. What it was, was heavy rain all morning and an afternoon with winds blowing between 8 and 20 knots.  The boat was moving around a bit and by the afternoon, when it stopped raining I was glad to get off and have a coffee in the nice bakery.

With this bad weather, and this being one of the few local harbours protected from a southerly wind, a lot of boats have been coming in.  The normal pontoon filled up on Monday afternoon.  They then put about 14 more boats on a wall on the opposite side of the harbour, usually used by fishermen.  Even more boats came in this morning and many are just anchored all over the place.  We are not sure what happens when the ferries come in!

With the heavy rain we of course discovered that we have a couple of leaks in the boat.  One, from the main hatch we knew about.  The padding on the top of the hatch has deteriorated and we had to pull it out.  That lets a drip in over the companionway.  Not dire, but annoying and we doubt there is much we can do about it without dismantling quite a lot of the boat.

The second leak is one we thought we had fixed last year.  That is water coming in through the mast fitting.  Richard tried to put some more sealant on, but only did it after it stopped raining and he is not entirely sure exactly where the leak is.  More rain is predicted for tonight and maybe he can then work it out.


The weather forecast isn’t great for tomorrow either.  So we are undecided whether we should go then or stay another day.  We do have lots of time before we need to be in Leros to put the boat away for the winter and we are running out of local places to go. 

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