Saturday morning was pleasantly sunny. The main entertainment was the laborious undertaking of getting the para-sailing platforms out of the sea.
First they detached the two halves and dragged one through the sea down towards the car park. Meanwhile, in the car park the digger was pushing sand back up towards Perdita's to flatten that end of the car park to make room. At this point a middle-aged woman wearing black appeared rather perilously at the top of the ten-feet high potential avalanche of sand and started shouting at the driver. He stopped digging and they then embarked on a thirty-minute argument with a lot of arm waving.
Meanwhile, the first half of the platform had now been successfully dragged through the sea, and was poised like a landing-craft just off the car park, with two men trying hard to control it in the surf near the edge. The argument still raged, and, watched by one small child, two dogs, and Gillie and me, the chorus of shouting was joined by a couple of tenors in the waves.
Eventually the woman gave up, the digger proceeded down the beach, and they made an attempt to harness the shovel to the raft and heave the front up.
The rafts are an interesting, ingenious construction clearly never designed to take this kind of strain, and for agonising (or hilarious, depending on your point of view) seconds it looked as though it would break in half. However, as the moment grew ever closer, sanity prevailed and a lengthy period of argument and re-examination of the engineering possibilities took place. Finally, a balanced lift to the front was achieved, and the digger began slowly to drag the cumbersome platform out of the sea and across the car park.
The car park contained only two vehicles: the digger and a purple quad-bike, which was strategically parked right in the path of the digger-platform behemoth that was backing at increasing velocity towards it. "Oh joy!" we thought, "They're just going to mash it!" But at the very last moment, one of the men ran past the digger and pushed the quad-bike out of the way, and the platform was deposited in its winter home. But all was not over: the digger lifted one side and then the other, and big polystyrene blocks were tumbled from some storage point atop the dunes, and placed under the platform, lifting it out of danger of winter tides.
We then retired to Mistral for an omelette and glass of vino to watch the progress of the second platform chunk from a comfortable distance.
Children and dogs wandered off, the digger departed, and we could safely say that there can be no more para-sailing until 2013.
Topic: Corfu in October (Read 39867 times)