This Swedish Mystery’s All Greek to Me
Before my curious gaze, I watched a Greek wizard discover a Swedish mystery.
Petros is the wizard’s name.
I hadn’t knowingly been acquainted with Petros until just the other day when I “limped” my sloop, Herald Bird, into Dave New’s Basin Marine Shipyard. Seawater still was invading my little 10-horsepower Volvo Penta diesel engine’s oil, despite efforts of knowledgeable mechanics to halt the leakage. But worse still, the engine was overheating and the gear shifting mechanism in the transmission that drives the propeller forward was slipping badly.
It was then I met Petros, whom New proudly calls his “Greek Mechanic.” Petros had spent three years working at the Volvo Penta plant in Sweden.
Later, as I watched Petros deftly, and with beautiful neatness and economy of movement, disassemble my engine, I discovered to my astonishment that I’d heard, figuratively speaking, the voice of Petros for two weeks a couple of years ago when my wife and I had toured the Greek islands on a Sun Line ship.
We had fallen asleep in the nights to the voice of Petros. And we had awakened in the mornings to his mighty throbbing voice as we sailed the Greek seas.
It was Petros himself who had installed the engines of our Greek ship, he told me.
And now it was Petros himself, an Athenian married to an American, who had divined my little engine’s problems and who knew ways to correct them without costing me a small fortune.
“You can fix it, Petros?” I asked as the mystery of the Swedish-made gears lay before me on the shipyard’s workbench.
“See,” Petros said. “This part is worn. It is of composition. I have a friend in San Francisco who can send me the part. I will call him today. I can fix it. I can make the whole engine like new. Not to worry.”
I am not worried anymore. I am so unworried I gave Petros a bottle of Ouzo, that 90-proof Greek licorice-flavored firewater. I told him how we’d sat in an outside cafe in the harbor of Mikonos, where octopi lay drying in the sun along a fence rail. There we had eaten morsels of grilled octopus and had drunk Ouzo with water and had listened to Greeks at other tables heatedly discussing matters with dramatic gestures we could not understand.
Petros’ eyes sparkled. “That is good! The only trouble is they cook octopus too much. It is better not cooked so much.” For his discovery, I said: “Effkareestow.” I explained that the Greek for “thank you” is the only Greek I know, but that I cannot spell it or pronounce it properly.
“It is enough,” he said gallantly.
I think I shall hold a Greek party in honor of Petros. I shall invite his wife, too, and Dave and Mrs. New, and a few others, and we shall have grilled octopus, not cooked too much, and drink Ouzo, and I shall cook my Greek chicken with yogurt and not too much nutmeg and cinnamon and a Greek salad with those tart Greek olives in it.
Even that is not enough.
Sailing Notes Jerry Levy and Carl Rischer of the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club are trying to attract the country’s best amateur dinghy racers for the club’s Olympic and Pan American classes regatta April 3-5 off Long Beach. The races will serve as a ranking event for six of the seven Olympic classes. Contact Ken Weiss, ABYC, 7201 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach, 90803. Call (213) 434-9955. . . . The Del Rey Yacht Club’s annual Puerto Vallarta Race begins Saturday. More than 30 sailboats have entered this 1,125-mile, downwind race. Half the entries are vessels more than 50 feet long.
