Super yatch spotting in Corfu

[sawyl]

Managed to sleep pretty well, despite the seas, and woke up bright and early ready for the morning watch. As soon as the sun came up we cracked out the sails and pondered out plans. We'd had a vague, unformed idea that we might stop at Ereikoussa for the night and make for Corfu tomorrow, but we all felt that we'd far rather get our long sail over and done with, so we pressed on and reached Corfu Town at around 16:00.

Mooring up on the NAOK quay, we found ourselves almost directly opposite a pair of Cayman Islands registered super yachts. The Allegria was fairly vasty and moderately stunning, but the Samar, with its helicopter deck was completely stupendous. All afternoon, a stream of minibuses arrived to drop off shopping — plants, food, bikes, you name it — for both yachts. When I saw a guy dropping off a vast crate of peaches, I suddenly found myself thinking of Jay Gatsby and his parties:

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.

The best, however, was yet to come. Once the provisioning process had been completed, an American guy — shoeless, but unlike the rest of us who were slumming it in bare feet, wearing white socks — came round to warn us that the helicopter would be departing in quarter of an hour and that we might need to secure any loose items to prevent the downdraft from blowing them away.

While we made our preparations, the crew on the Samar made theirs. These involved lowering of the railing around the helicopter deck, playing the James Bond theme on their sound system and helping three of the crew struggling into fire fighting apparatus. I really felt for firefighters. Not only did they have to wear fireproof overalls and breathing apparatus in a 40 degree heat, but they also had to cower on the deck below the helipad, ready to rush up at a moments notice, but sufficiently hidden to prevent the incomming oligarch from having thoughts of mortality.

Tired out by our exciting day, we decided not to eat out and had aubergine risotto on the boat. Supertime entertainment came thanks to the French guy on the boat alongside, who managed to tip his keys out of his breast pocket whilst leaning out from the quay to check the tension on his lines. Boy, was he annoyed.