After 2 weeks in Paros we were ready to leave. We had a decent weather forecast open up for Friday, which called for 15-20 knots of wind along our route (perfect), 1m or less waves. The forecast was slightly worse in the afternoon, so we got up at 5am to leave at 6am.
The only issue was that the winds were expected to be from the NE, and possibly too much on our nose to sail direct.
We woke up, had our coffee, I used my small checklist (created after leaving the swimming ladder in the water once too often) raised anchor and off we went. One sad thing was we tested our bow-thruster and it didn’t work (seemed to work before) so this needs to be fixed. We motored out into the forecast weather. The winds were light in the morning. I motored for the first few hours until the winds picked up and we began sailing. After an hour of sailing, we were heeled over too much for everyone’s comfort, so we reefed the main and jib still making good speed. At this point the winds would have been 35 knots or so (around 60 kph). The waves were getting quite big and our deck was getting washed regularly, but still no issue. Around this time we heard a ‘Pan Pan’ call for a boat in distress, but we were too far away to help.
This trip was also taking us over our 2000 nm total sailing travel. This is 3700 km! I keep a boat’s log and had seen us creeping up to this milestone.
In the pictures I’ve shown here, you can see that our route was going under Mykonos into an open channel. The winds are almost always north in this channel, and for the past several weeks have been shown as bright red on weather charts. You really are protected from the wind by the big islands (like Mykonos) but in open areas with a large ‘fetch‘ the wind and waves really accelerate and can be much worse than forecast. (This is a terrain effect on wind and waves and I’m quickly learning to pay attention to this effect. Seems too complex for the weather models.)
We were sailing through here and in the last 5 nm or so we became caught in an un-forecast storm. Possibly this was my fault, because the other day I had mentioned to Victoria that because of advances in technology our weather forecasts are excellent 3 days out, and this wasn’t the case 20 years ago. I suspect someone is listening to me boasting and they are teaching me to stop. I had jinxed us.
We were now motoring with bit of mainsail for balance, to stop the boat rocking side to side, and I was hand-steering us through 40 to 50+ knots of wind. This was a Beaufort 10 storm. The wind was getting up to 100 kmh. I was getting soaked, but I had my head stuck up through an opening in our bimini so I could watch the waves. For the extra large ones (3m or so) I would turn the boat into the wave so we were less rolled, and then turn back on the other side. We had the most water enter the cockpit and the seating area ever. Everything was drenched either by spray coming in through my head-opening or by larger waves rolling up the front windows and then pouring in through the window-sides (the left-front window lifts up and is not sealed). The other amazing thing was seeing the white-caps of the waves turn into spray. I’ve seen this once or twice before during thunderstorms on lake Ontario, but this was over large swaths of ocean. The wind just pulls the water from the top of the waves into a white-spray. Even with my hand-steering the boat is moving side to side quite a lot, and of course the wind was screaming, and the dingy on our davits was moving around quite a bit. Around this time we also had to maneuver around a big tanker that was exactly crossing our path. I slowed down and changed course a bit (I didn’t want to move too much away from the wind) and he went past probably less than 200m in front of us. I wonder if they noticed us and wondered what we were doing in the storm.
Just to be clear, we were in no real danger. We probably could have gone down below and let the boat bob around. A guy in Crete told me that he and his wife had done exactly that, went below and lay on the floor for 2 days because they were in such a horrible storm in the Pacific. It was so bad they literally couldn’t move! This boat is tougher than us, we were just not very happy being bounced around. (One of us was much less happy than the other ;-). (As an aside a boat like ours was abandoned a few hundred miles off the US coast in bad weather by new owners in a storm, and it arrived perfectly fine off the coast of Europe weeks later.)
I was expecting this to get better when we got to Ikaria, because the island would block the wind. I was wrong! The wind got stronger, and even more surprisingly the waves got worse and started coming directly onto our side! There was some land effect of the wind over Ikaria that accelerated the wind. Fortunately our anchor spot was just inside the tip of the island, but when we approached the small bay we could see no protection and we were still in the terrible wind. We picked the next bay that looked larger, and it did look like a more regular anchor spot, but we still had wind at 50 knots. I turned in, and after slowing down to drop anchor it was difficult to hold the nose of the boat on a course….if it moved a few degrees either way the wind was so strong I had to use full throttle to push it back! Anyway we got to 15m depth, Victoria couldn’t see the bottom but we dropped anchor anyway and I let out 55m of chain. Thankfully the anchor held.
We were out of the storm, but still had the raging wind. But at least we could rest. Right after we went below we heard an emergency call (actually a screaming alarm sound) on the radio…..but no position and no trouble indicated…….I felt badly for whoever had pushed the emergency button on their radio, but without a location there was no point thinking about helping. We spent the night listening to the storm, having the boat really jerk about around its anchor…..listening to the odd crash as something fell….not really sleeping. At 6am Victoria had had enough and we raised anchor at 6:30 and around 11am we were in a super-nicely protected bay in Fournoi. The water is only 20 degrees and seems cold, but it is perfectly calm here and seems like paradise. There is a taverna we can motor to in the next bay. I’m sure we will stay here for a few days.
This was our worst storm yet. The world and weather and life are not perfectly predictable. Hope the next storm waits for another 2000 nm! Although in the future we are going to let the weather settle for a bit longer before heading out. If we had waited one or 2 more days we would not have had this experience.
Adventures on Spruzzo 