So far Greece has been eventful. The journey here was a dream which was a relief after we cut short our stay in Montenegro on the basis of the wind forecast (from past posts it's probably clear that these are rarely reliable). We covered the 173nm in 30 hours (6 hours less than expected) and 18 of those hours we were sailing - not bad! It was a pretty extreme ride with probably the biggest waves we've seen on the whole trip but Starfire is right at home in those conditions and we were rewarded for the hours of rolling around with our speedy arrival.

Obviously after a 30-hour journey through 3m waves, you just can't wait to hit the customs office... Checking in to Greece from a non-EU country required a fair bit of trekking around Corfu town but everyone was very helpful and eventually (having employed the Dutch rather than English approach to queuing), we got it done. We celebrated with a trip to the nearest supermarket to stock up on feta, halloumi, tzatziki, hummus and Greek yoghurt - living the dream!

Having sailed in this region before, we had a bit of an idea where we wanted to go. We set off for a cute little town called Lakka on Paxos in time for Gerard's birthday, hired a moped and did a few loops of the island (it's not very big). We'd heard good things about Emerald Bay on Antipaxos but you could hardly see the crystal clear water for the tripper boats so we moved on to a quieter spot.

We had quite some excitement through the Levkas canal - a narrow channel with a moving road bridge which only opens once an hour. Just as we were about to enter, our engine cut out! Fortunately there was wind so we put the sails up and got out the way so Gerard could do some fixing. He managed to get it going again and I was still praising him as a hero when we approached the canal for a second attempt and it cut out again! After about an hour of inconsistent performance, we decided that since the closest anchorage was through the channel, we'd just have to give it a go, hope for the best and be ready to put the sails up if it all went horribly wrong. Luck was on our side because we literally made it about 5m past the bridge before the engine cut again. Once we were safely anchored on the other side, we started racking our brains about what the problem could be. Long long story short, after much panic, hours of sweating over a hot engine and fair bit of diesel in Gerard's mouth, we finally discovered that we'd run out of fuel. Seriously! In fact, in our diligence in trying to ensure the engine was running well before entering the channel, we'd run the pipes so dry it took about half an hour to manually pump diesel back through. Lesson learned!

A more enjoyable activity has been going to the open air cinemas we seem to keep happening upon of late. The films we saw were rubbish but ironically both were set in Greece and the setting and atmosphere of the cinema were amazing - there was even an intermission and beer!

Our latest bit of drama was in Cephalonia where we popped our crossed anchor cherry after an Italian boat was directed by the (underpaid or under-qualified) mooring man to drop their anchor right across our chain. Apparently this is par for the course in the Med so we've been lucky so far that we've avoided it - and lucky this time that it was easily sorted. The rest of our time in Cephalonia was much more fun, revisiting the beach where we got engaged, being rowed around an underground lake and seeing parts of the island that we missed last time.

We just arrived in the Peloponnese, the last region we'll visit before heading back up to Corfu. Not long to go now!