July 19
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A beautiful still morning in Porto Koufu
A day to work on the dinghy.
Walking around trying to find parts is pretty
The first job of the day was to try to round up the parts for repairing the dinghy. We needed fiberglass and we needed new pad eyes, we had epoxy, epoxy fillers, plywood, sandpaper, paint brushes, and mixing paraphernalia that we would need. So Rick and I set off to try to find the fiberglass and the new pad eyes. Porto Koufu is a fishing village so the stuff had to be available at a local hardware store. No hardware stores but the gas stations had a bit of hardware stuff, but not the stuff we needed. So we split up, Rick was going to try to get a ride to the next town and the girls were off to groceries and I was going to wait for the girls, take them back to the boat and start working on the dinghy repair. 
Neat iron work
The idea was to clean up the holes and make plywood covers for the holes. For the lifting points we would sandwich the existing locker bulkhead with 1/2 inch plywood on each side epoxied to the bulkhead with additional tabbing on each side of the plywood inside and out.
I was getting the girls to check every once in a while to look for Rick waving at the dock. I looked over as I was working and thought I saw Rick walking along the dock and got Bonnie to check while Bonnie was looking at the dock, I noticed a dinghy approaching and Rick waved at me from the dinghy. He had hitch hiked a trip out to the boat with a couple of Italian couples who were vacationing in the area. The bikinis on the Italian boat had a very small amount of material and accented beautifully!
By the time Rick got back we had the dinghy basically ready for the epoxy work. Now we had to make patterns for the plywood and cut it out. As he was working on drilling the holes for bolting the sandwich together, we noticed that we were moving. So we dropped the dinghy, picked up the anchor and tried four or five times in four different locations before we finally got the anchor to stick where we had enough room to swing. Every time we anchored we either had no room either on boats or on land. The anchoring depth is 30-40 feet in most places and the area with less than 40 feet is small. If you don’t have 30-40 feet you have 65 to 95 or worse. We had a big yacht come in while we were trying to anchor and he dropped in about 90 feet of water.
We got anchored and Bonnie worked on the dinghy while Rick and I painted the plywood bits with epoxy.
Bonnie with her head in the dinghy locker
Rick had no luck with hitch hiking until he got picked up by a vacationing guy from Germany (he was originally Greek and he has grandparents in the area north of us). He invited them back to the boat for drinks and he and his girlfriend came over, it was nice to visit with them. It also kept us from messing with the wet epoxy.
A beautiful still morning in Porto Koufu
A day to work on the dinghy.
Walking around trying to find parts is pretty
Neat iron work
The idea was to clean up the holes and make plywood covers for the holes. For the lifting points we would sandwich the existing locker bulkhead with 1/2 inch plywood on each side epoxied to the bulkhead with additional tabbing on each side of the plywood inside and out.
I was getting the girls to check every once in a while to look for Rick waving at the dock. I looked over as I was working and thought I saw Rick walking along the dock and got Bonnie to check while Bonnie was looking at the dock, I noticed a dinghy approaching and Rick waved at me from the dinghy. He had hitch hiked a trip out to the boat with a couple of Italian couples who were vacationing in the area. The bikinis on the Italian boat had a very small amount of material and accented beautifully!
By the time Rick got back we had the dinghy basically ready for the epoxy work. Now we had to make patterns for the plywood and cut it out. As he was working on drilling the holes for bolting the sandwich together, we noticed that we were moving. So we dropped the dinghy, picked up the anchor and tried four or five times in four different locations before we finally got the anchor to stick where we had enough room to swing. Every time we anchored we either had no room either on boats or on land. The anchoring depth is 30-40 feet in most places and the area with less than 40 feet is small. If you don’t have 30-40 feet you have 65 to 95 or worse. We had a big yacht come in while we were trying to anchor and he dropped in about 90 feet of water.
We got anchored and Bonnie worked on the dinghy while Rick and I painted the plywood bits with epoxy.
Bonnie with her head in the dinghy locker
Rick had no luck with hitch hiking until he got picked up by a vacationing guy from Germany (he was originally Greek and he has grandparents in the area north of us). He invited them back to the boat for drinks and he and his girlfriend came over, it was nice to visit with them. It also kept us from messing with the wet epoxy.