Astypalea to Santorini: The midnight pickup.

We spent almost a week in Livadi Bay at Astypalea. It was a beautiful bay we were anchored in 7m of clear blue water. We swam every day, we had a castle on a hill to one side, we could hear the bleating of wild goats every morning and every night we had a beautiful sunset. There was a family run restaurant on the beach that we ate at twice, which was quite good and gave enormous portions. We took the dingy with the 20 hp outboard around the corner (first time in the dingy outside of a bay!) and visited the main port which is quite small. The population of the island is 1200!! It is a beautiful butterfly shaped island and very quiet.

I mentioned my 20 hp outboard because while it is powerful enough to move the boat in an emergency, which is why I got it, it weights about 50kg/108 lbs which I didn’t think was a big deal…..but it is. There are no handles on the outboard, so it has a harness I have to put on to move it from the rail of the boat to the dingy. We need to use a halyard (rope) from a mast to pick it up and lower it. Someday the harness is going to break and the engine is going to fall….and it is brutal to raise and lower when the boat is moving around…I’m thinking of getting an ‘everyday’ small electric outboard motor that I can move around more easily.

Victoria’s daughter was coming to join us for a few days on the boat, and we wanted to spend some time in Santorini (Thera). Santorini is one of the well-known Greek Islands. If you look at it on a map, you can tell that is used to be a bigger island before the volcano blew up leaving a big hole in the centre of the island.

We had another great day of sailing. The winds were 15-25 knots from the south (which is not usual for this time of year) and we made 7 knots almost the entire time. Very pleasant day! Approaching Santorini was very cool as well…..as there seemed to be a mist around the cost…..Victoria said it reminded her of Skull Island from the King Kong movie!

Santorini turned out to be a bad idea for us…..there was literally no good place for us to anchor (anchoring forbidden in lots of the bays), there are no marinas and the public docks are used for tourist boats….so we had a problem……how to pickup Danae?

The winds were going to be from the west, so we were looking at being somewhere on the west side of the island. My first idea was to do a beach pickup with the dingy…..except Danae’s plane was landing around 11pm and maybe the beach was not a good idea at night. We found a spot with a small fishing port nearby. We anchored outside and it was quite rolley even though we were fairly protected by the wind. We were not in a bay. We were not going to get much sleep that night.

We get the call that Danae is on the way. Victoria and I get in the dingy at 11:30pm. Luckily there is half of a moon out so we can see something. I really felt like we were doing some kind of commando raid. Victoria is holding a very bright flashlight in front of the dingy so I can see a bit on the water, and I carefully go into the old fisherman’s port which is full of old concrete with random rusty pieces of metal poking out. We pickup Danae and her luggage without anyone getting stabbed by rusty metal and head back the short distance to the boat. We do the night transfer of Danae and her luggage to the rocking boat. Mission successful…..and now I can have a beer and sleep.

As expected we had a miserable night of little sleep because of the boat moving around (this is why you anchor in harbours and not in the open ocean 😉 so in the morning, even before having coffee, we started up the motor and headed north to Ios which is wonderful. Stay tuned for the Ios update next.