Ios to Schoinousa: Yet Another Unexpected Adventure!

After a few pleasant days at Ios with Nour (one of Victoria’s friends, who is now my friend after bringing me a very nice bottle of Scotch) we decided to leave our nice big bay and move east and slightly north to Schoinousa, a small island south of Naxos.

Windy predicted 18 knots of wind from the north, which is not a lot for Spruzzo. Here is the route we took:

I was thinking the wind was going to be blocked by the big island in the middle of our route, and I was planning on going north around the island to get better wind. Turned out not to be an issue.

The winds were 30 knots in the harbour when we left (clue #1). This wasn’t really a problem since we had an excellent sandy bottom and our anchor was really dug in. There was a guy learning how to windsurf just when we were leaving, and he thought it was a good idea to sail around our boat just as we were raising anchor. Victoria wanted to kill him.

Anyway we get the anchor up and head out of the bay and start heading north. As soon as we are out of the bay we start getting 35+ knot winds and quite big waves coming at us from the front/left. It is hard to size waves, but these seemed to be 2m+ tall and it was like riding a horse with the forward/backward and side to side motion. It was a workout just trying to keep your head steady. We had many waves breaking over the hull of the boat (the water gutter beside me in the cockpit looked like a small river) and we had water wash up the boat to actually flow up the windscreen and over into the cockpit! We have had spray into the boat before but this was the first time that the instruments got a bit wet (my kindle was there I had to save it!). Every so often we would get just the right combination of waves to bring the nose up 30 degrees on a wave, and then we would crash down about minus 30 degrees with a huge smashing sound. There was the inevitable odd crashing sound from inside the boat when something would come loose and go flying. It would have been a real challenge to be inside the boat just to hang-on and not be injured. (I have read about people in worse weather just going below and lying on the floor of the boat.) I would not have wanted to be out in the sea in a smaller boat that is for sure.

We heard one Pan-Pan call (less serious than a Mayday) of 4 people on a boat needing assistance, but we were too far away to help. Helping anyone in waves like this would have been a huge challenge. If anyone fell overboard it would have been extremely difficult to pick them out of the water. (There is a technique called heaving-to that I would use that is supposed to stop the boat in the water even in bad seas but I didn’t try it today.)

We also had a giant ferry come toward us at 41 knots (we were moving at 5 knots at the time). It was lined up to intersect us from 5 miles away and I was a bit concerned because those guys move so fast….turned out to be fine but it had my full attention for some minutes. He passed by fairly close to us but the waves were already so big we didn’t even notice his wake!

After about 90 minutes of crashing into waves and general excitement we got turned heading south-east and everything became much nicer. We had the wind and the waves from the back, I put some sails out (we still had 30 knots so not full sails) but the sails and the change in wind direction suddenly made it a very nice sail. We made 7 to 9 knots for the rest of the way and I no longer felt like I was in an adventure movie.

We are now anchored in this beautiful bay (main post picture) and I hope we stay here for some days. I had a nap, Victoria is making dinner and life is good.