March 2023

An early visit to Greece this year had been demanded by the need to eliminate the diesel bugs that had contaminated both of our diesel tanks, or so we thought! The contamination had been identified on the pre-filters during the winter service in October 2022 and it was agreed that the engineers who service our engine would book a couple of days in March to come and ‘deal with it’. To gain access to both service hatches in each tank, the table and floor needed to be carefully removed, so Nigel insisted on being around to do this easy part! Hence our trip to Preveza.

We decided to make a bit of a holiday of it and our friends Brian and Michele flew with us to Thessaloniki in the middle of March. We enjoyed an interesting drive of about 4 hours, over the snow-capped mountains to get to Preveza. We were startled to find the quay in a complete state of rebuild, so no boats at all could moor here. The locals reckoned the work may be complete by the end of May, but that seemed optimistic.

Here we rented apartment Oikia owned by a charming and helpful local Greek lady, Dora. It was ideally positioned next to one of our favourite restaurants, The Mermaid, in a street just behind the quay. Sadly for us The Mermaid was closed, but we found plenty of good places to eat and we had some fun evenings together. We made daily excursions to Cleopatra Marina to do a few jobs on Deja Vu including treating rust on the keel, servicing all the winches, fitting more electrical points and more. Nigel and Brian stripped the main cabin in preparation for the diesel tank work and the nasty job was duly completed with less mess than Mo had anticipated and a declaration that only one tank had in fact been contaminated, thank goodness.

A great relief to have this job completed, we took a day off to go sightseeing around Preveza, seeing a new port under construction just north between Preveza and Parga, and visiting the interesting ruins at Nikopoli. Sadly the main exhibits had closed when we finally got there but we saw plenty of evidence of what had been a remarkable Roman city in its day.