TYW Day 1: Sit Around and do Nothing

We planned this day all wrong.

Call it a bit of Christmas Eve jitters, but we were awake and out of the hotel as fast as possible on Saturday morning in an attempt to arrive at the port in Lavrio (Λαύριο) and get our trip started off immediately. What we didn’t know, is that the skippers are required to get on your boat, and our skipper wasn’t told to be in Lavrio until 4 PM.

Cue 6 hours of sitting on the dock waiting.

Drinking.

Waiting some more.

Then we had this great idea to go get some food. So we walked to a restaurant close to the port and sat down for lunch. They offered a large array of alcoholic beverages… and club sandwiches. And that’s it. So we ordered 5 beers and 5 club sandwiches and..

Drank.

And ate. And waited some more.

Our sister boat, the Swea of Sweden (hereby known as the Sweaty Swea) included Manuel, Iggy, Alex, Tom & Ken (the twins), Whitney and Libby. The Sweaty Swea’s skipper was Mark, hailing from the UK. The Freja (my boat – having no stinky nickname because Louise kept us more or less in ship shape) consisted of myself, Justin, Mitch, Matt, Tom, Jon and Alisa. Our skipper Louise came down here from Sweden and was the tiniest drill sergeant I’ve ever seen.

The Sweaty Swea’s skipper, Mark, had arrived early and was ready for his rager. So they headed to the grocery store and got out of port before Louise even got to town. In addition to our minor skipper delay, Alisa, the Freja’s last to arrive passenger, had missed a connection flying in due to “Poland sucking” and was now stuck in Warsaw set to arrive in Athens about 9 PM. The immediate future looked grim for the Freja so we did what any group of self respecting bored people do.

We drank some more.

After Louise finally arrived, Justin inspected the boat with her while the rest of us headed to the grocery store to pack the necessary supplies for a week of sailing. This rounded out to be about €300 in junk food, hangover breakfast, beer and water.

We loaded the boat, headed to a gyro place for cheap dinner and then back to the original bar we had visited earlier in the night for our first night out.

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