April 2022
Garry’s dream of having a boat was now dragging on and with the increased boat prices because of Covid, our stash of cash needed to be increased. The Barn full of sound gear needed to be placed on market place FB for the world to ponder and purchase. Garry’s opinion of they will never buy it would soon be changed as we marveled at the response to own sound equipment that was from the stone age, my opinion lol.
After waiting a long time hoping for the 54DS to pop up out of thin air in Garry’s price range, he was forced to change his goal and chop 4 foot off the boat. Garry started to looking at Jeanneau’s at 50 foot long, he found one in Athens or so we thought. Now being able to fly out of the country we jetted off for 7 days on a boat shopping trip.
We had made plans with a couple of brokers to see 4 boats whilst in Athens and I had booked accommodation nearest the 1st marina we had to visit for duration of our stay and we had hired a car to drive to the other 3.
After looking at the 1st yacht it was 15 years old needed new rigging, new teak deck and no doubt lots of other things too. The owner would not drop his price and being at the top of our budget we could not afford to put right the wrongs to start with.
2nd boat which we thought was in Athens! turned out we had to drive 4 hours to a port to get on a ferry for 1.5 hours to travel to a whole different island called Zakinthos. This too was a tired looking yacht missing a little TLC sitting out of water unloved. It was worth the 20 minute tour and long trip as Garry decided he could live with the 4 foot chop, but the actual boat we looked at was worse than the 1st.
I thought I would try and cheers Garry up with a walk around the block the next day to see the sights around the hotel we were staying at, as we had a couple of days to kill till the next boat viewing. As it turns out the block was the old Olympic Village and adjoining airfield they built 2004 nearly 3 hours later Garry had enough with walking whoops. We hopped onto a tram the next day which took us into the centre of Athens so Garry could see the Colosseum, which then provided another conundrum for Garry as they appeared to have moved it to Rome.
The decision was made not to drive 10 hours to the 3rd boat and then a further 3 hours to the 4th boat and then back 13 hours a day later as they were even older than the 1st two boats we looked at.
Instead we looked at several piles of rocks, did some more travelling on the tram to different places to look at more piles of rock and played at being a tourist for a couple of days.