Working on boats, the story of my life continued!

As mentioned in a previous post, I started sailing in the 80s. Initially I dreamt of becoming a professional skipper. But life, family and other work conspired to keep me from realising that dream, at least immediately. I continued to sail and mess about in boats in one way or another.

Working on boats. Here I am in respirator mask and standard Mediterranean protective clothing, removing gelcoat with a heatgun from a batch of Beneteau First 345s which had been diagnosed with a bad case of osmosis, as a result of a duff batch of catalyst! It was warranty work for Beneteau who covered all costs as the boats were only 6 months old or so... I then worked for Peter Sheriff who had the contract from Beneteau for the Eastern Med. We even had boats arriving from Israel to be fixed... 

 

 I also dabbled in a bit of racing too.

Third picture up from here, I am delivering an Atlantic 31 over to Gouvia. I look bored because for some reason I never liked those boats.. they were so slow!

In the picture above I am definitely looking smug, we must have been winning...

Bit of frostbite sailing at the local club, somewhere round 1993 I think

 

Somewhere round here I started acquiring an eye for nautical themed photography... This is a snap on the ferry over to Igoumenitsa.

In 1992 I started working for the Corfu base of a big charter company, Vernicos Yachts. This is where I did my first professional boat handling and sailing. Also my first skippering jobs and deliveries. Here we are with then boss Dimitri, my sister, then wife Maria and me in Paxos. This must be end of season somewhere round September 1992.

 

 

We had taken a Jeanneau Voyage 12.50 charter boat that was free and gone off for a much deserved end of season sailing trip. Coming back from Antipaxos on Sunday evening, we realised that no one and certainly not the captain (wasn't me) had checked the fuel. Captain got worried though so I said lets pop in to Gaios and I will see what I can sort out. I jumped off and went into Gaios Travel to find Yianni Arvanitakis, the owner and long time collaboarator of CV Travel which just happened to be managed by my mother. One phone call to the petrol station owner to open up, and the loan of Yiannis jeep and jerry cans later, and I turned up at the dock with plenty of fuel to return and then some. Captain was stunned and I earned some more brownie points for sorting out the situation so quickly. I put it all down to a valuable lesson I learned when working at the yacht agency. When you need to source something, there is always a way.  

 

I also did a lot of cruising with family and friends, and after a long break got back into racing again, but more of that in the next post!