Day 109

3/19/2014

My friend Nick not only found me a shower, he found me an apartment undergoing renovations that had a soft bed.  I slept soundly.

I was on the water this morning by 8:00.  Immediately I ran into a headwind and current.

Visibility was low.  A mist that wasn’t quite a fog thickened through the morning.

Hills dropped into the water with short cliffs on the north eastern end of Corfu.  I passed two sandy beaches.  The woods behind them were colored with yellow and pink flowered trees.

The crossing from Corfu to Albania is about a mile.  I pushed into the headwind as quickly as possible, not wanting to get squashed in the shipping lane on account of the low visibility.

The southern tip of Albania is almost empty of people.  I passed some cows and a couple of pristine beaches.

I paddled along the edge of a marsh, where the water was just deep enough to properly plant my paddle.  Seagulls sat on a low sandy beach and giant tree trunks littered the seascape, as though they came there to die.

A small Albanian island was surrounded by fish farms.  The island had a dock, a shack and three men drinking coffee and smoking.  The dock was high, but with their permission and encouragement I climbed an extremely rusty ladder to set foot on Albanian soil.

They spoke a little Italian and invited me stay for coffee.  They lived on the island, which didn’t have nearly enough room for a game of ultimate frisbee, and watched the fish farms.

After another 10 minutes of paddling I was back in Greece.  Big mountains climbed out of the water.  Some of them had flocks of sheep.

Schools of fish swam beneath my boat.  The rocks on the bottom seemed to support more plant life than their Italian counterparts.

The whole day I fought into the current.  The wind died down, and the sea was flat, but I was exhausted from battling the current.  I stopped to rest frequently.

I arrived in Sagiada, a small port lined with with cafes.  The supermarket is a 1.5 kilometer walk from here, but the people there are really friendly.  No shower yet, but hopefully something will turn up.

Meanwhile, the front compartment of my boat is still leaking so I tried applying a thin layer of a new kind of epoxy to a large section of the keel.  

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Nautical miles paddled: 20

Current location:  39.624937,20.181294