August was a busy month on the boat. We moved around between islands more than usual. My sister and her family visited and everyone had fun! My brother-in-law bought a spear-fishing gun for the boat. I Med-moored (backing-in) to a dock twice without my bow-thruster, which I was concerned about….. but it turned out to be not as bad as I expected.
The challenge of a missing bow thruster became the opportunity for me to learn how to better handle Spruzzo backing up. The trick is patience and strategy: The boat will not turn as quickly as with the bow thruster, nor with as much force. You need to give the boat time to move and make sure you are pointing into the wind (backwards) as much as possible.
Here are pictures of everywhere we visited except Gyali which was also very beautiful.
The spear-fishing gun is about a meter long, and has a very strong rubber band to propel a 50cm or so barbed spear, and is a novelty for me. I have never been a big fisherman although I did buy a fishing rod last year. Victoria caught fish this year and I cleaned them (think I did this last as a kid) and we had a free delicious fish dinner. We were anchored in crystal clear water in an uninhabited bay of a small island called Gylali. Gyali has a pumice mine (stones used for scrubbing feet)….I found a big one that floats and it is very cool!
One afternoon I swam around looking for fish that I could potentially spear-fish. I quickly noticed that smaller fish, say 9cm and below, were not too scared by me but bigger fish that you would be interested in eating, seemed to magically know when I was looking at them and start to swim away. I noticed a fish swimming by itself and went over to look. I was able to get very close, and I noticed that it’s right eye was cloudy. This fish was ostracized because it had an eye infection! I was noticing a lot of fish behaviour because I was swimming around pretending to spear-hunt fish with my new spear-gun.
My sister described being on the boat as like being ‘at a cabin’ which is a good analogy, except I would describe it as a floating moveable cottage. We avoided the potential tragedy of toilet paper going in our marine toilets, which tends to clog them and is messy to fix. The week they visited was the least-windy of all of August, but also the hottest. Victoria and I are used to the heat (I notice it is hot when the peanut butter is more liquid than solid) but our Canadian family with permanent air conditioning felt warm at times. The joy here is you can just jump in the ocean if you are hot! We have 3 air-conditioners in the boat but it is not usual to run them unless you have shore power. You can run the generator to run the air-conditioners but that seems criminal to me unless someone is going to die from heat-stroke. Or Victoria insists.
The latest adventure was leaving Astypalea for Crete, where we are now. We were travelling with our friends Peter and Gila who were sailing on another Amel, and since we had an 80+nm trip (about 150km) it could take 12+ hours, and we wanted to arrive while we still had daylight, so we decided to leave at 4am. The previous day a charter boat had come in, and I was fairly sure they had dropped their anchor over mine (you drop your anchor in front of your boat when Med-mooring to hold the nose of the boat) and this could be a problem, but I didn’t dive to check. Turned out it was a problem. At 4:10am or so, after moving out of our spot and raising our anchor we saw that we were pulling up another anchor on our chain…..the charter boat’s anchor. I had removed chain and lines caught on my anchor before but this was the first time I had managed a caught anchor. The issue is the anchor is hanging on our chain and gets dragged up….but it is heavy and hard to move. It took me a few minutes to figure out what to do and being in the dark didn’t help. I tried to move the anchor away with a boat-hook but it was impossible. We had almost a full moon, I had on a head-lamp and a flashlight so I could see what was going on. I made a loop of rope out of my anchor snubber line, put it over part of the other anchor, secured the line through my bow roller and tied it off, then dropped my anchor chain, moved my anchor chain to the outside of the anchor and it’s chain, and then cut my poor anchor snubber line to drop the problem anchor. Anyway we got free and headed out around 4:30am. Minus a full-sized anchor snubber but plus some experience.
We had an almost perfect sail to Crete. We had 18-25 knots of wind most of the way which is perfect to move our boat at 7 to 8 knots. After we had found the wind and set the sails, we literally just sat back and watched for hours as the boat moved towards Crete. It always amazes me at how the boat just sails itself. I would change course a degree or two to account for drift, but that’s it. We literally did not see another boat the entire way (except for Peter and Gila’s boat…..they are faster and were visible for about half of the trip). But we did see a big pack of dolphins! They hung around our boat for a long time playing in the wake. There was a patchy-brown coloured one that stayed the longest. Always special to see dolphins.
At the end just offshore Crete we had 33+knots and I had to take in the main and put only a bit of jib out and we were still doing 6 knots! Thankfully it was very calm in Elounda Bay where we will stay for a few days. I don’t want my cruising summer to end just yet.
Adventures on Spruzzo 