Astypalaia to Crete

Our last long voyage of the summer is to go from Astypalaia to Crete: 82nm. If we do an average of 5 knots this means over 16 hours of travel, if we do 6 knots it means 14 hours. This year our sailing speed has been around 5 knots. We only have 12 hours of daylight, and we don’t want to drop anchor at night, so we leave at 3am and target for 5+ knots of speed. We were travelling with our friend’s boat Mausi which is an almost identical boat.

We leave right at 3am with no moon. It is pitch black. You can barely see the other boats in the harbour silhouetted by the scattered lights on shore, and the boats have small anchor lights at the top of their masts, but if you look outward to the sea you can see nothing: the shore and the sky are merged.

I have my GPS map in front of me of course, but I’m not very happy depending on just one source of information when I can’t see anything, so I turn on our radar to help navigate in the harbour (the boats show and the land show up on the radar….the boats as smudges).

We successfully raise anchor and move out of the harbour. We had enough wind to sail right away, so we pulled out our jib and sailed. I was on deck until sunrise, and the night sky was magnificent.

I’m not up in the middle of the night very often, and on this night there was no moon. The brightest object in the sky was Venus which was so bright it looked like a small sun and actually left a ‘light trail’ on the water. I’ve never noticed this before except from the moon. There was another bright star a bit ‘east and down’ from Orion that looked very bright to me and seemed to be changing colours…..but I can’t figure out what star this is!

The milky way was clearly visible as a fuzzy white patch crossing the sky. The constellations you know are easy to pick out. In a city you cannot see the sky this clearly. The Messier objects are easy to see….they show up as fuzzy white patches. The only one I know by heart is M45 the Pleiades cluster which you can easily see as a cluster of bright stars with binoculars.

It would be great to have a telescope on board….but with the boat moving a normal telescope would not work at all (even binoculars are a challenge). It would be interesting to make a ‘stable platform’ that could support something like a telescope…probably a digital image sensor….but I can think of lots of technical issues. Might be a fun winter project. I’m sure you would need a combination of a stabilized platform and digital image processing to remove any remaining jitter….but even if you could have a screen-display for skywatching on a boat it would make night passages much more fun! But any magnification is going to make the stabilization very difficult. (BTW I started this….the tiny digital motion sensor costs only a few dollars! I can’t believe how cheap it is! I’m not so hopeful this is possible but the technology is amazing.)

We had a great sail. It took us just under 14 hours to get to Crete with an average boat speed of just under 6 knots. I didn’t have all my sails out at night so we only did about 5 knots until daylight around 7am.

One small adventure was a few hours after we had left there was a huge cruise ship, obviously visible to us because it is lit up like a Christmas tree, moving at 15 knots across our path. Our partner boat hailed them on channel 16 several times to make sure they saw us…..but they never responded. It is a bit concerning that a 100m boat sailing at night is not monitoring their radio, but we obviously saw them and we didn’t have a conflict.

The super annoying thing is my friend’s boat, which is an identical boat, was WAY WAY WAY faster than our boat! I can make a list of reasons why this might be the case, but they were so much faster it was ridiculous. They had recently had their hull cleaned, and have a folding propeller (our propeller is fixed and our hull is dirty) but the difference was just outrageous. When we arrived I dove under the boat to see if we were towing a fishing net! Nothing was there…..they were just faster. This cannot stand.