Day 298 - Julie's Birthday - Sailing to Ermion and Back to Poros

The first thing I did was pull the flowers and the chocolates from the boat's fridge and passed them to Julie, who was still in bed. It was perhaps not her most exciting birthday other than it was on a boat but will be a memorable one.

I took off with the boys and found some really huge chocolate croissants in a little bakery place at the end of the dock. After breakfast, we asked one of our boating neighbours to take our photo as a family, all sitting on the end of the boat. 

We were able to sail most of the day today and are really getting into the whole experience - well at least I am. During the first part of the morning we are constantly having to shift our position as the winds coming over the cliffs to our port side, are all over the place. As soon as we pull around the headland the wind stabilizes and we are able to set our course and keep it without constant correction.

We have lunch on board and keep going as we are not sure if we are making sufficient headway to get to our destination in time. We have learnt that you are better off pulling into harbour earlier to secure the easier berthing positions. If you leave it too late into the afternoon you are in competition with many more yachts and you find it harder to maneuver.

I look up the approach to Poros in the Guide to Ports which they kindly give you before you set off. They tell you the various landmarks to look forward and the approaches that should be avoided. From a distance of several miles, the shoreline looks all the same and it is very difficult to distinguish the bay on the island of Poros from the channel between the island and the mainland. It is not at all obvious until you are right on top of it.

We prepare the boat for docking as we approach the channel, tieing the bouys onto the hand rails, preparing the aft end mooring ropes and opening the anchor hatch and testing the motor mechanism. We are all set. I head for the place where we had docked previously with out skipper as I prefer to start the docking process from a position of knowledge. We head along the chanel past multi-million pound motor yachts (of the Robert Maxwell variety) and spot our previous mooring place. It is taken. But right in front of us is another even better place but it requires mooring along side. From my point of view this is a preferable maneouver to make (you don't need to reverse or use the anchor) but the boat is not prepared to be docked this way.

We back of and I put the boat into a circular holding pattern whilst we transfer all the bouys over to the starboard side and take an aft mooring line and attach it to one of the forward cleats. The boys are then stationed fore and aft ready to jump onto the dock and haul us in and Julie is relieved of her anchoring duties.

As soon as we are securely moored the boys are off fishing. It was Julian's turn to fall in today, fully clothed, as he was attempting to fish off the back of the boat with a fishing net. Those darn fish were just too far away. We spotted an old lady whom we had seen on our previous visit. She was still fishing, using an 8 foot pole to get far out into the harbour. She had a good selection of caught fish and we assumed that she had probably fished here all the time since we had left 3 days earlier. We noticed that she was still there last thing at night and first thing in the morning. Perhaps she was doing it commercially and selling the fish to the local restaurants.

We went for our most memorable walk tonight, along the town docks. There is a stretch of perhaps a mile and it is littered with shops, bars and restaurants. None of which were too busy (we are still in the very beginning part of the season here) but neither too quiet to be dull. We window shopped, found a map ships chandlery and bought a chart of the area to take home with us, had an ice cream and gawped at the luxury yachts . All the time the sun was setting and the warmth of the day was being reflected back off the stone of the pavements and the walls of the buildings. Absolutely perfect.

Day 297 - Sailing from Hydra to Ermioni - May 29th 2005

Our skipper left today. He has done his 2 days. His name was George and he was a history teacher at "A" level grade. He skippers yachts in the Aegean in the holidays for extra money. He has been sailing these islands for 28 years and seems to know everyone on every boat in the area. It was very reassuring to be with him for the first 2 days. We rather hoped he would spend some time going over all the ropes with us but it seemed that skippering to him only involved taking us places. Fair enough.

I had been truthfull with the charter company about my sailing experiece and they had accepted my experience as sufficient although they did say that George would be given the task of determining if I was fit or not. George never really got an opportunity to see if I could sail as he did the whole job himself. I think he was only really interested in getting us to our destination. So now we are on our own.

This in itself is not a bad thing except that in Hyrda the harbour is only the size of a football pitch. This in itself is not a bad thing except that the harbour is filled up with millions and millions of dollars of swanky 100 foot motor cruisers. Again not such a bad thing but the Philipino crew of these swanky 100 foot motor cruisers start getting very twitchy when 32 foot yachts with inexperienced skippers start manouevering close to their hulls. You would not be able to do a runner if you scratched one of these things.

I didn't feel too bad as I had already seen some charter boats doing some very dodgy things. Most of the yachts around here are chartered to tourists. Most of whom have probably had years more sailing experience than I. But the thing is every boat has it's own characteristics which take some getting used to. The best thing to do is to go to a quiet bay and practice anchoring and reversing and get a feel for your boat (something we had planned to do today).

Well since I hadn't yet had a go with the boat (George having done his job) I was very nervous about taking the thing out into the harbour for the first time with no experience of the boat's turning capabilities or how quickly it might respond in reverse. This was going to be fun. Julie was at the anchor station and the boys were on the aft lines. The idea is that you slowly move the boat forward whilst the anchor person weighs the anchor and the linesmen let out the lines whilst still holding the boat under tension. It kind of went that way although at some point it looked like we were moving too fast over the top of the anchor chain which meant we could have damaged the hull of our boat. I reversed up a little and we brought the anchor home and then set off. I then had to do a 180 deg turn and pass through the small channel of the entrance to the harbour. It is such a busy harbour with all the ferries that come and go, I was half expecting to be hooted at by some enormous ship but we managed to escape without any damage being inflicted.

Over the chart table Julian and I had determined the bearing we needed to steer from the entrance of the harbour to our new destination. We made a heading of 272 degrees in order to make anchor in the bay of Skindou off the island of Dhokos. Typically the winds in this area at this time of the years are northerlies. This means that if you want to find a nice peaceful bay in which to stop to lunch you should aim to go to on the south side of an island or piece of land. That way you will be sheltered from any wind originating in the north and have a flat stretch of water in which to anchor. The bay of Skindou is on the north side of the island but happily the wind changed direction during our journey.

On this first part of the journey we did not have the courage to raise the sails and preferred to get used to running with the engine. In fact the wind was so light that the sails would hardly have filled anyway. About an hour and a half after we set off we arrived at the mouth of the bay and seeing that others had anchored, headed in.

We chose a spot in between two others boats that were about 200 yards apart. When the depth got down to 20 feet I pointed the boat into the wind and Julie released the anchor. The water was so clear that you could see the bottom. About 35 feet of chain went out and we waited for it to bite. After 5 minutes of checking our position against the other craft it was clear we were not moving or at least not moving quickly. I could kill the engine. We took a reading on the GPS as apparently it reads as closely as 2 feet and would tell me immediately if I was drifting.

The next job was to release the dingy and fix it up with it's outboard motor. We got it going quickly even though it's quite a job manhandling the outboard without dropping it to the bottom of the sea.

Having this little "toy" on board was greast fun. Sammy particularly enjoyed buzzing around in it. He loved the independence it gave him and the sense of control over a machine. He ferried the whole family, one by one, to the nearby island and took off on his own to explore the coastline.

The island which was half a mile wide and a quarter long, was inhabited by one household with several horses, a couple of donkeys, a very loud dog and (for some reason) one dead and one alive ostrich. We spent half an hour combing the beach and looking in the little chapel. The only other people we met we 2 girls who had swum ashore from one of the other boats in the bay. The boys were wondering just where one of them might have lost her bikini top. This was the boys first encounter with european lady's beach attire (that they could remember) and it lead to several interesting conversations.

Our boat and dingy from the island.

After returning to the boat and having some lunch we weighed anchor and took a new heading for our next port of call, the harbour of Ermion. This is really on the Greek mainland if you don't count the Corinth canal making it an island. It was pretty simple to follow the compass on our new course but then we decided to try a bit of sailing and found it was impossible

The wind, which was now blowing almost directly from our intended destination, meant that going in that direction could only be accomplished if we tacked from side to side. These boats are not capable of sailing very close to the wind. The best we could achieve was to sail about 70 or 80 degrees either side of it. Going any closer than this resulted in a considerable reduction in speed. The overall effect when you tacked from one side to the other, was that you almost appeared to be changing course and sailing in completely the opposite direction. It was after all a course change of nearly 160 deg each time we tacked. And whether you were left or right of the wind you were never apparently sailing towards your intended destination.

This was rather off putting for Julie who is always more interested in arriving somewhere rather than the getting there. It was my fault, I had failed to explain to her, prior to our departure, that this part of our travels was about the sailing and not the arriving. Anyway we were getting our first taste of hoisting and trimming the sails. Julian and Sammy took on being winchmen. Julian adopted the port winches and Sammy the starboard and we didn't loose any winch handles overboard.

After an hour or so we decided that the progress we were making towards our destination was so slow we probably wouldn't arrive this week. The wind speed was only in the 10 to 15 knots range and the boat was not really moving with any gusto. So we dropped the sails (both main and genoa were self furling which is really neat) and started the motor.

The engine on board was a Volvo marine 19 hp, 3 cylinder diesel. It gives about 5 knots at 2,500 rpm with very little noise or vibration and will deliver up to 8 knots if necessary.

We motored up to the harbour with some trepidation as this would be our first test of docking on our own. Luckily we found the harbour had plenty of empty berths and not many expensive looking motor yachts around. The crew got to their stations and we headed in. There were 2 pontoons projecting from the harbour wall and the boats were berthed aft in against these pontoons. It was a very tight fit. The distance between the pontoons might have been 4 boat lengths and there were boats against each pontoon. I brought the boat in and did a 90 degree turn with only a half boat's length of space spare fore and aft. It was a tricky bit of parking but Julie let go of the anchor at the right time and the boys flung the ropes across to waiting helpers. We were in. Our first docking.

We immediately set out to look around the small town and found wonderful croissants and a shop selling all sorts of fishing equipment. We bought 2 packs of line and some hooks for about 3 euros and the boys went fishing for the next 2 hours. It was Julie's birthday the next day and I managed to sneak out and find some flowers and chocolates that I stored in the fridge for the next day.

The dingy and outboard provided almost as much fun as the sailing. Sammy became the expert and willingly ferried the family to remote islands and interesting coastal features. Cooling off in the water was also essential as soon as you were anchored and sheltered from the winds. It was hot. 

Day 296- Arriving at Hydra, Aegean Sea, Greece - 29th May, 2005

We have just arrived at the beautiful Greek island of Hydra aboard our chartered 32 foot Bavaria yacht (see: http://www.bavaria-yachts.com/index_go.htm - click on "models" and then on "32"). We employed a skipper for 2 days and he has now left. I am on this big boat with a scratch crew but with very light winds. God is being good. He needs to be.

We are planning to travel around the islands for the next 6 days. Tomorrow I am drilling the crew in sail up, sail down procedures. They don't even know the difference between fore and aft!

It is very difficult to park the boat around here. You have to drop the anchor, reverse into a slot at the same time as pulling in the anchor to get a hold in the front. Then you have to have your crew members tie you up either side in the aft whilst the strain is taken on the anchor. You have to do this under the watchful eye of a harbour full of Fastnet professionals just itching for you to make a mistake. Man it's a sweat. Just ask the Bubbs. We haven't capsized yet!

Julie fell in the harbour today (just ask the Bubbs). Which was a bit of a shock to her but no surprise to me. She was trying to catch a crab for Julian that was running up the harbour wall. About 6 people sprang to pull her out including the harbourmaster who had already told the boys to be very carefull because the rocks were slippery. Poor Julie. She went right under and she hates to get her face wet. She really was quite shaken but recoverd after a hot shower (this boat has everything - the GPS system is really good fun).

Anyway just a quick post from an internet cafe (I can't get the satelite up-link to work - oh yeah!).

Just a reminder, it's Julie's birthday on 31st May. Any e-mails would be appreciated. We will try to find another harbour that has internet to read them all on the day.

Pray for light winds and no mutiny.

Day 296 - Poros to Hydra - Sailing

The morning we walked along the harbour and saw the old fort. We picked up some provisions for our next leg, stowed the ropes in the manner in which we had been taught by George and set sail.

We were on our own now, no skipper, heading to open water.  We motored out (the easy bit) and then unfurled the sails. And it all worked perfectly. We even got the boat over at a 45 degree angle, much to Mummy and Julian's horror.

The harbour at Hydra and an example and the type of boat that one tries to avoid hitting when entering or leaving. This particularly nasty looking boat came from the US and looked more like a naval gun boat except that it was called "G Whizz". Not exactly the sort of thing that would impress the locals. No wonder so many people treat the Americans with suspicion. This sort of ugly and blatant display of wealth is not the way to win friends and influence people and actually spoilt the whole view of the harbour and made our little boat look like a toy. Beastly.

 

 

This is George the skipper we had for the first 2 days of our sailing voyage. I had rather hoped that he would spend some time showing us the ropes but his idea of skippering was to deliver us to our destination rather then show us what to do. We spent enough time with him to gather what we needed. Here we are sailing in heavy seas (Beaufort 6). The swell was pretty excessive and Julie was feeling very poorly. Luckily it was only necessary to experience this whilst crossing the open seas on the way to the islands. After this we were in sheltered regions only. 

Day 293 - Lavrion Port and collecting the boat

We traveled from Athens to Lavrion, on the other side of the peninsula by taxi, which was a ride of about 2 hours. We had booked into a hotel at the Port of Lavrion. Well it was a marina at least. We had a lovely big family room and the rest of the hotel was practically empty, as it's still the off season.

The next morning we set off for the marina to find our boat and sort out all the paperwork for our voyage. Although I had done a dingy sailing course before and had a Canadian licence for a ship to shore radio, I was in no way entirely qualified to captain a yacht of this size. I managed to swing it with the authorities that I was sufficiently versed and the papers were stamped. We decided to be prudent and we had hired a skipper for the first 2 days. The idea was that he would show us the ropes and then we would take it from there.

The boat, named Phivos, was quite extraordinary. It was brand new and had never been sailed. The steering wheel was still bound in protective tape. However, it was fully kitted out, including SatNav, a dingy with an outboard and every conceivable safety device there is.  

The rental company sent a diver down to inspect the hull. They do this before you go out and when you come back. Just like they go over your rental car at the airport. To make sure you haven't done any damage.

We signed the forms, hopped on board and George, our hired skipper took us out to the open seas. We headed south, hugging the coast line and not long after, as it was now getting late in the day, we anchored up in Temple Bay. It was a lovely sheltered spot and we were in about 30 feet of  crystal clear water. We set up the SatNav with an alarm to warn us if we were going to drift in the night. The boys got snuggled down in the cockpit after we had supper in the galley.

After our first night afloat, George set sail and we headed across the open seas of the Saronic Gulf. It was way more choppy than yesterday and Julie was not at all impressed. The winds got up and there was a significant swell. George set the sails at half mast and we made a bee line for Poros.

It was pretty exciting sailing for this boat load of landlubbers. Some of us enjoyed it more than the others!

And we spotted our destination port on Poros.

George did all the necessary docking manoeuvers, explaining very little in the process and leaving us all with the dread of how we would accomplish such feats by ourselves. He left us at this point and got a hydrafoil back to home base. Now we were on our own!

We got the dingy out and did some instruction for the boys and a little exploration of the port. The dingy was to become Sammy's favourite.

Mummy prepared a meal for us while Sammy went to the dockside and helped the locals with their fishing.