Month: March 2011

 

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This blog covers a long stay in Lido di Jesolo on the edge of the Venetian lagoon where cruising was mostly with various friends and family on a frequently used weekend circuit. The usual route would be to leave the Porto Turistico di Jesolo marina and go down the Fiume Sile, not infrequently getting stuck on a sandbar in the mouth of the river, and then out to sea and back into the Venice lagoon and along the Giudecca Canal cruising past St Mark’s and as far as the cruise ship port. Turning around we would then go to Murano and moor alongside in a canal there for the night. Then off to Burano to anchor for another night and return to Fiume Sile the next day. Most of the lagoon is too shallow for sailing boats, the water is very rough from all the water traffic and because of many cables buried in the mud, there are very few places to anchor so options are limited. Sometimes we stayed out of the lagoon and would sail eastwards but that coast is not very interesting. One time, we delivered my Uncle Frank and Aunt Brenda to their cruise ship by parking under the cruise ship’s bow. Security was not happy. Another time, we were not paying attention to the dates and got accidentally mixed up in the middle of the Americas Cup race off St Marks. The water police made us anchor in, perhaps, the best spectating spot available and we watched the race eating lasagne. And once I tried a late-season run south to Corfu with friends Ian and John. We got as far as mid-Croatia but gave up due to timing and weather. After almost seven years of of this unadventurous stuff we needed a change and relocated to Preveza, Greece in the Ionian Sea.

Mostly I didn’t keep a regular blog over this period. These are some of the few events I wrote down at the time. They cover a time when we we re-fitting for another around-the-world trip which we planned to do in stages during H’s cruise ship work vacations. It didn’t really happen as some health issues got in the way.

02-22.02.2016 Lido di Jesolo, Venice, Boat repairs and a visa for India

Grapto was not really fit for human habitation after so long on the hard so I stayed for a couple of nights in a hotel in Lido di Jesolo while I got things working. The main thing was new house batteries which I got in “Casa di Batteria” in Jesolo. Countless other essential bits a pieces were sourced in the local chandleries.

I had a quick trip on the ferry to St Mark’s to catch the tail end of the Carnivale in Venice. I just missed the fireworks and the whole piazza was ankle deep in confetti with a few masked revellers lying around looking stunned. I’ll make a better showing another year.

I needed a tourist visa for India so I could go ashore from H’s cruise ship in March (Plan A) I applied for an e-visa which is a wholly unnecessary bit of bureaucracy in this modern age but it turned out to be no good if arriving in India by boat. So (Plan B), I schlepped from Venice to Milan to go to the Indian Embassy to get a full-blown tourist visa. The embassy, which is just behind La Scala opera house, was stuffed with Indians trying to get home to the mother country. I think some of them had been there for days. After all kinds of adventures trying to get the specified size of passport photograph  I was told they would keep my passport for 8-15 days. With a Pakistan visa already in my passport my guess is I would be lucky to ever see my passport again. So that was a waste of two days of driving, 40 Euros in road tolls and an overnight hotel stay. Plan C is to try again in Bangkok. (Note: Bangkok didn’t work either.)

So back to working on the the boat. It rained almost continuously for two weeks and working outside with power tools is not recommended in the rain so it slowed things down a bit and soon it was time to head off to Marco Polo Airport for the flight to Abu Dhabi and Bangkok. See our trip Saigon to Venice.

13.-24.06.2016 Lido di Jesolo, Antifouling and Re-flagging

Progress was made with the antifouling. It is a nasty job but two coats of Primocon and two coats of Micron in a fetching navy blue have made it all look nice again. After four years in the boatyard Grapto was finally on the move. With a British Red Ensign and Italian and Venetian courtesy flags flying majestically she made the short voyage from the cradle into the water and was towed another 50 metres into a berth. This was Grapto’s last voyage under the “Red Duster” as she is now German-flagged but we had no actual German flag to hand. Being towed onto a berth felt a bit like we were the “Fighting Temeraire” although unlike that ship it is planned that Grapto will battle again. The reflagging was not really a “Brexit” protest, although it might have been if I had thought of it, it was just that a revised Part 1 registration suitable for my UK residency status was going to be expensive to arrange as all local marine surveyors qualified to take a tape-measure to the boat wanted several thousand euros to confirm what they could have found out from a catalogue.