This was our 4th summer on the boat and our shortest at just under 8 weeks. We were late starting because of required maintenance, and we had to come back early because Victoria has a dentist appointment in Athens in September.
We travelled exactly 400nm and just over 1/3 of that total is leaving Crete and coming back. We did not go into a marina once, but were at anchor the entire time and only visited 3 islands: Astypalea where we stayed for almost 2 weeks at the start, then Kos where we were for most of the summer and Tilos where we had our dragging anchor adventure.
Our idea this summer was to have no plans and to sail where the winds would take us which we mostly did. Trouble always happens when you have a schedule….and the trouble we had in Tilos was because we stayed when we should have left. (I wanted to go but was over-ruled 😉
In the past we have gotten bored of a spot after 3 or 4 days. This year Victoria was working and I was working a bit as well, so we both had things to do most days which made it easier to stay in one place. In Kos there were 2 places we hung out: Kamari which is a bay on the south/west side of the island and Kardamaina which is not really a bay but a long touristy waterfront a bit more east. I loved Kardamaina. We found a bar called Stone Roses that made the best Strawberry Daquiri I have ever had. The bartender said it was the fresh strawberries and they are probably grown locally. Everything delicious needs great ingredients. They also had Guinness on tap. And a Gin and Tonic menu where you could pick your favorite Gin *and* favorite Tonic Water. I could have gone there every night! People have criticized Kardamaina for being ‘too British’ which is true….it is not a typical small Greek island experience. Kamari is more typically Greek and much smaller. We had Bill Gates’ boat WayFinder nearby and the 5th or 6th biggest motor yacht in the world called Blue just behind us! Never saw Bill on the island though.
WayFinder at 68m long is less than half as long as Blue. I saw another large motor-yacht beside WayFinder….probably 25 or 30m long (Spruzzo is 16m) and the large motor-yacht looked tiny! You can’t really tell how big these things are without something beside them to compare.
Anyway, Kamari is a more proper protected bay. We ended up leaving Kardamaina and going back to Kamari. We were getting swells from the side and really rocking and it was not so comfortable….so we left. Both places had crystal clear water. Temperature of 30 degrees and and you could easily see the bottom at 10m. I swam probably 3 or 4 times a day. If you feel hot you jump in and the water is so buoyant you don’t need to swim to keep your head above water. It is so relaxing. Except sometime there is a bit of current if you can’t swim you will be washed out to sea.
Tilos was a nice spot as well, but it was deep anchoring (about 10m) and the bottom was grassy……grassy is not so good for the anchor holding. Dragging at night was not fun and sailing back to Kos in the middle of the night with 35+ winds was not fun either, but at least we didn’t end up on the shore like two other boats. Tilos really should have permanent mooring balls installed, it would be much safer. Much like the weather where the poor Baysian yacht sank in Italy we had a prediction of high winds…..but no storm forecast that I saw. There must have been a thunderstorm or something similar just over us in Tilos to cause that much wind (it all happened so fast I didn’t even get a chance to see the wind speed). I’m going to do a bit of research to see if I can figure out a way to know if there is a probability of a storm in the future.
Our trip back home to Crete was a mini-adventure as well. The weather forecast for the day was for roughly 18 knots of wind from the west so we would have decent wind from the side which the boat likes. We left at 3am and I decided to motor until sunrise so I didn’t need to mess with the sails in the dark. There was half a moon. Leaving Astypalia we had 25-30 knots for the first few hours when we were motoring, and every so often we would get a chain of larger waves that would really rock the boat but nothing too bad. After sunrise we started to sail which we did until around noon, then the wind died so we motored for a few hours and then sailed again. We were sailing at 7+ knots for a lot of the time which is top speed for this boat. Sanding the bottom-paint made a huge difference to our boat speed.
The wind just before Crete and in particular around the entrance to Elounda Bay is notorious for being worse than the wind outside. Probably this is because of the high-mountains of Crete pulling some of the faster upper winds lower. Anyway we started to reduce sail when we were getting 30+ knots and the waves got a bit larger….maybe 1.5 to 2m with the occasional larger waves. These are Mediterranean waves so they come quite frequently. A few miles out we decided to motor the rest of the way, so I could pick a more comfortable angle for the boat and the waves which was fine until we got to the mouth of Elounda Bay. We suddenly had gusts over 50 knots….going from 0 to 20 to 50 then back to zero. It was crazy variable. We have massive cushions on the back of our boat and one of the 50 knot gusts made them both fly out. Victoria saved one of them but the other went over. No way I was going to turn the boat around to try to save a cushion as we were inside the bay and we had shallow water all around.
I don’t think we will go into Elounda Bay in the future if it is windy outside it was not worth the trouble.
We anchored in Elounda Bay in around 5pm depth, and this was our fastest trip from Astypalea to Crete. About 14 hours.
The next morning, we motored to our home marina in Agios Nicholas. It was not too windy and the bow-thruster makes me look like a hero when we dock. The first thing I did after we were docked was go for a hot shower. When you are out anchoring here you don’t really need or want hot water…..you just want to rinse the salt off and the boat water is probably 30 degrees which is not cold…..but boy did I enjoy the hot water shower! (We have a hot water tank, but we just don’t really use it in the summer.) I also noticed that I had a general body ache like I had been working out. I wonder how many calories you burn per hour when you are moving around a rocking boat.
Back in the marina we can enjoy the marina things: good pizza, air conditioning because we have shore power (it is always hotter in the marina), a bar close buy with cheap beer, easy to buy groceries, easy to get rid of garbage……but I really miss being able to wake up and jump in the water every morning.
Next year we are thinking of heading over to the Ionian (between Greece and Italy) where the winds are much calmer….no Meltemi. We can go visit Kalamata. We will probably head west across Crete and spend a few days in Chania in the main port and then head north from there. I miss being out and anchored already…..but the pizza we had last night was quite good. We should all strive to enjoy what we have.
Now for my boat maintenance readers (the rest of you can stop reading): The front toilet stopped draining again. I had previously replaced the ‘up’ hose to the holding tank as it had become totally clogged with some crystal (salt/urine creates this). One of my boat buddies told me that the problem would re-occur further up the connection path but I was willing to fix that later. Well it happened sooner than I expected, so I had to take off more of the toilet parts connecting to the holding tank. I cleaned what I took off in sulfuric acid (I tried phosphoric acid first but it did nothing). That worked very well but there was still clogging further up. I spent 2 days manually trying to clean this out and got quite a bit of material out but it was still clogged when I put everything back together. I have just received a plumbing tool that I can connect to a drill that should go up there and help me remove the remaining buildup…..have that to do. This all happened in Kos luckily there was a good hardware store in town.
The impressive looking Bosch L5 077 truck batteries (6) I installed last year in Lesvos barely lasted the summer. In August I needed to run the generator every night before bed to have enough power to make espresso in the morning. Not good. Will have to replace them next spring. I have the batteries connected to a Victron charger which is supposedly state of the art, and I fully charged the batteries once a day. Bosh if you are listening your batteries were crap.
Just before our trip back to Crete I noticed our starboard running light was not working. I inspected it and of course the base was very corroded so I cut off the light and was able to take it all apart, remove the corroded wire and re-wire it. I had to re-wire it hanging off the side of the boat and I couldn’t get 2 screws for the base in so I’m going to need to replace the bulb/base but at least it worked for the trip home. Backup plan was to hang a flashlight with a green cloth over it for our green starboard light!
Adventures on Spruzzo 