Our Departure from the Shores of Albania to those of Italy
On the 10th July, we left Orikum, although not without incident. With a healthy Force 4 blowing on our nose, negotiating out of our tight and shallow spot was not an easy task, not when we also had to clear the mooring lines of a yacht that had come in next to us. With David on the bow, shouting turn (before we beached on the river bank), with our neighbour´s bow line still too close to our prop to turn, I have to say it was a little stressful. Still our depth gauge said we had .3m under us, even when we came to a very abrupt halt. Clearly the 2.6m depth the marinello had told us about didn’t take into account the concrete blocks that were in place to hold the bow lines and that we couldn’t see through the murky river waters. Pretty sure we caught one of these with our keel, but thankfully were going so slow not to do any harm… Still we would think twice before being put in this spot again, were we to ever return!
We then set sail for Vlore, where we had to clear out from in the morning, before we could say goodbye to Albania.
Vlore
We are sure there must be an old town to Vlore, but we only saw the modern touristy one, full of high-rises, a promenade and a very long sandy beach! They are also in the midst of building a new very posh marina, so we could see that it would not be peaceful during the day with piling sand dredging going on, but we weren’t stopping! We looked from afar, watching the sunset, with some grub, and vino, ready for any early appointment with Customs!
The following morning, we had an appointment for 7:30am, but having jumped in the dinghy ready for it, we were told they were doing a system update and had to wait an hour. arggggh…. still it gave us an hour to wander the promenade and have a nice coffee.We were then advised by our agent that in fact he wanted us in a different place to hand over the paperwork, this required a short hop through the pilings of the new marina in our dinghy, which didn´t go unnoticed by a number of workers telling us to go all the way outside of the new development, clearly we didn´t understand Albanian so carried on our way without taking the 1.5 miles detour they wanted us to take.. Safe to say we didn´t get into any trouble with the authorities, or the dredger!
And finally we were done! We set sail at 8:45am and had a wonderful sail in a NW3-4 relatively calm seas for 52 nautical miles, arriving and anchoring off a place called San Foca, on the West Coast of Italy, ready to start our Italian Adventures!
10th July 2023
