Naxos Harbour

We decided to go to the Naxos marina for a few days so I could see the city, which looks amazing, and also to get fuel. I called the day before, and the marina guy told us he had space and we should arrive before 11:30am. We woke up early and left our very nice comfortable spot at 9:30am. The winds were forecast from the north 15 knots+.

Naxos is very close to another island called Paros, just to the west, and again we had our favorite tunnel affect with wind and waves. The apparent wind on our nose was 30-40+ knots, and we had big 2m+ waves that we were smashing up and down on. Fortunately we are getting used to this so it was not as big a deal as the first few times. How-ever, after we got north and turned the corner we suddenly had these big waves hitting us from the side, and we did some big side to side movements with our rails going into the water. You can imagine Victoria was not very happy with this, so I turned us into the waves a bit to make things more comfortable, and then headed more south with the wind and waves towards the port. Amazing how much easier it is having the waves come from behind.

At this point I called the marina to let him know we were about 1nm out, and he informed me he didn’t have space. He was expecting people to leave, but they didn’t because of the weather. I was in a boat that was bouncing around just outside his harbour, and I was very annoyed. A range of angry responses danced on the tip of my tongue but I was nice and asked him to call us if a spot became available. We didn’t have a plan B (which we will in the future) but I slowed the boat down and pulled my phone out and found that there was an anchoring area just north of the marina.

We pulled in the area, and began an unexpected trial. Victoria had just mentioned that morning how great our anchor has been. This was possibly a jinx (I’m more and more convinced something is listening to everything just to mess with everyone). We spent over 2 hours trying to anchor…..probably 7 or 8 attempts. The bottom here is not all sand and has some garbage (old nets, plastic bags) on the bottom. We dragged on weeds once, caught a plastic bag once, caught an old net once, and had a few other unexplained failures. The worst part though, was attempt 4 or 5 where the anchor seemed to be holding. We were both sitting in the cockpit waiting to see if the anchor was going to hold and it seemed to be OK, so I grabbed my mask to jump in and visually check it. The water was a bit murky, but I followed the chain until I could see the anchor, and it was starting to drag. I could see it billowing up mud. I turned around to swim as fast as I could back to the boat….but the boat was moving away from me as fast as I could swim! I could hear Victoria yelling from the boat that the anchor alarm was going off. I’m a pretty strong swimmer still, and I was going as fast as I could and finally I caught up to the boat and climbed on. Victoria had started the engine…..but that was a scare! From now on I’m not checking the anchor if the engine is not on and Victoria and I have agreed on the procedure if the anchor starts to drag.

Anyway a few more attempts after that one and we were good. The anchor is not perfect, but it is set (I visually checked) and it is not dragging. If we don’t get in the marina tomorrow we are going to head to the next island to a better bay for anchoring. I will see Naxos, where Zeus was raised in a cave, next time.