Boat ride, sunburn, and fish

After getting up late and having breakfast in the canteen - where you can't get Coke in glass bottles, but you can buy a can for €3 - we decided for this very reason to buy groceries for the boat trip in the nearby minimarket. Even in the touristy supermarket with beach tennis, straw hats, flip flops, and sun lotion, it can't get more expensive. In fact, the local products are affordable for the tight budget, and the water comes frozen as ice to take away; so you can plan until late afternoon (actually, you can only start drinking in the late afternoon). From there, we went straight to one of the many boat rentals. Although the competition is tough, there is no one at the boat rental pavilion. You can also take it easy. While the XT driver is already thinking about the half-day rate, the landlord comes from the café next door. €80 and we have a boat for four people and 10 horsepower for each. Let's go, the briefing is short: "Have you ever driven a boat? Bye!" Navigation is done with a business card on the back of which you can see the outlines of half of Greece. Since Corfu is not included, but can be seen from the boat, we ruled it out as one of our possible destinations. With Aphros' local knowledge, if you can call it that, we drove along the coast and quickly realized that we had initially circled around an island, so we set ourselves bigger goals. Captain XT headed for the open sea. With rudimentary knowledge of the right of way from his boat license course, we were able to prevent accidents. Because we were shocked to find that we were not the only ones who had a boat and rudimentary knowledge of navigation. To stay true to Greece, we approached the coast again. Malta would have denied us entry into the port anyway, and the Italians are stubborn with small foreign boats landing. The first bay suitable for anchoring was at a depth that was too deep to bring groceries and swimming gear to the beach without getting wet. So we had our second breakfast on board, which we really enjoyed. From there, we continued our search for a shallow bay that had not yet been discovered by others - a very realistic assessment of the situation - along the coast of the islands in the Ionian Sea. Whether it is thanks to the goodwill of the Greek gods or the persistence of Aphro, it doesn't matter, the result counts. We found a bay where no one could be seen, the beach sloped gently into the sea, and the pebbles massaged the feet comfortably. A bathing shoe would not be the worst tool, but the view of the blue sky and the blue sea enchants all the passengers. A bit like the bay of "Bacardi feeling" but without Bacardi. There was no alcohol on board anyway. The two male sea bears stayed in the shade with some skepticism, while the graceful nymphs talked in the blazing sun. At some point, "enemy" boats of tourists approached - because we were now locals on our beach - the first ones turned around without us having to raise the cholera flag. Others were more persistent and cheekily anchored on our beach. One group even left their boat. The hostile takeover was due to the outnumbered situation and we gave up. On board, there was a slightly reddish skin tone distributed on the sun-exposed body parts. A well-known phenomenon that does not occur with longer stays in the shade. But we all know that know-it-all attitude brings nothing, and eventually everyone gets it. Red is the new brown. Back in the safe harbor, the Greek captain took his boat back and with his friendly gaze, showed that he had seen worse. In the shade of a café, we planned the rest of the evening with cola and frappé. Without knowing the quality of the restaurants lined up door to door on the promenade, we first checked them out and tried to make a decision with randomly chosen quality assurance features - what does the service look like, how many cats are already there, is there Coke in glass bottles, average age of the guests, are there any guests at all, does anyone speak Greek there, etc. The criteria were rather inadequate, so we went to where nothing was going on but we liked the name. By the way, a good decision. We had fish, octopus, calamari, various Greek appetizers. Everything seemed perfect, price and performance as well. When the divine messengers joined us, the XT driver in particular did not yet know that he had ordered a child or senior plate. At this point, he was still quite satisfied. He was almost full and it was delicious. Maybe it was because the divine messengers are about the same age as the nice, good-looking Greek waitress, or maybe it was just a coincidence? In any case, the same portion of calamari at Antonius's place was twice as big as his previous one. No envy, but some jealousy arises there. Are over 50-year-olds being discriminated against here? Probably not, the friendliness of the Greek waitress clearly showed that the kitchen sometimes does it this way and sometimes that way. We returned to the hotel on motorbikes and had a classic wine brought from a winery by us. Yia Mas!