Naxos Harbour: Med Mooring, Big Boats and up the Mountain

The marina is right beside the main Naxos tourist area. The Naxos tourist strip, just below the ancient castle with its twisting passages and old rock walls, reminds me of the waterfronts in Chania and Reythemo both in Crete. It is not as busy as Chania, which was literally wall to wall tourists, and while we are not tied immediately beside the main walking area we are not far away and we can hear the music from the bars. I just heard songs from the Tragically Hip and then the Barenaked Ladies back to back, both Canadian bands….very neat. The restaurants and bars are stretched out over a longer area just like in Rethymno. The restaurants we tried here were all excellent too! The waiter at the Italian place was very insulted when I asked if the cook was Italian….he wanted to bring him out to talk to me! Anyway the pizza was great.

We docked in the marina here after almost a month of anchoring in bays. It is always a little stressful coming into a new marina….where do you go? do they have mooring lines? will someone be there to help? will we have a strong cross-wind? how big will the space be? We came in and the young harbour master waved at us and pointed. There were no mooring lines so we had to drop anchor to hold the bow, and Victoria and I had an animated conversation during the docking procedure about where exactly we were told to drop anchor. The harbour guy seemed to tell us to drop anchor quite far out and to the right of our spot which made no sense to me. You want your anchor to be set in front of your spot to hold the bow straight off of the dock. I dropped it where Victoria insisted it goes (I listened for once), far out and to the right, and it turns out that is what he was suggesting because there is chain on the bottom in front of our spot. The wind was mostly behind us, so it was not so hard to drop anchor, let chain out as we backed into the spot slowly and steered with our bow thruster. I turn around in the cockpit and face backwards when I dock because when I turn the wheel I can turn it in the direction I want the boat to go (even though the rudder does not do much). I really control where the boat is going with the bow thruster which is amazingly effective. At the end the boat is hanging off the dock from the anchor and is slightly in reverse. If you need to get a bit closer you let out a bit more chain, and you push the stern around with the bow thruster. The first Med-mooring of the season went fine. I apologized to Victoria (in fairness V is almost always right) for doubting her about where to set the anchor.

Naxos is the largest island in the Peloponnese and has a lot of ferry traffic. Victoria and I have taken large ferries from Crete to Athens (we really enjoy the ferry) but here I get to see large 200m+ ferries Med-mooring (anchor then backup then lines from the stern) just outside our harbour. It is fascinating. One of these big ferries, I just checked, displaces 37,000 tons.

Spruzzo displaces about 14 tonnes, and we are a fairly big private boat. I watch these giant boats drop anchor (just like Spruzzo), turn their stern to the dock and back up, just like Spruzzo except their engines must be 20,000 times more powerful…. and it seems so based on the amount of white water they push around from their sides. I know these boats do these trips daily, but doing similar manoeuvres myself makes me appreciate watching them maneuver.

At dock we plug into power. The marina guy told me the water here is not good for drinking so while I don’t need to run the generator and watch the batteries all day I still need to make water. I don’t want to fill up our tank with questionable water, even though we have an excellent filter. Normally I wouldn’t run our watermaker in a harbour (the ceramic filters will go bad quickly if they get oily or polluted water) but this harbour is quite open to the sea outside and seems clean to me so I will run the watermaker instead of trusting the tap water.

However being open to the ocean also means that when the giant ferries is maneuvering, even from 200+m away, we get a very strong prop wash in the harbour. A few times all of the boats here have been quite strong pushed around…..we have been moved so quickly from the concrete dock that I wondered if our mooring lines would break! You would never get jerked around so much at anchor.

We took a bus to one of the old towns up the mountain. I don’t recall the name (Apeiranthos but I will never remember), but it was a 40m bus ride and 600m up. The views were amazing. Very mountainous, very steep valleys.

The town was lots of narrow pathways with a variety of old and very old structures.

The cave where Zeus was raised was nearby, but we will save that for next time. On Wednesday we are going to make the short hop over to Paros. I expect we will anchor out for the next 3 or 4 weeks. We are fully gassed and have a ton of food. I am very much looking forward to jumping in the water to cool down again!