Trawler Blogs

We’re aboard Envoy at Greece’s Lefkas Marina as we prepare to leave her for the winter and return home to New Zealand in just a few days.

Back to mid-September – with an overnight onshore wind change we’ve had an uncomfortable night anchored off Poros and shift in the early light of morning to Antisamos Beach for a calm and enjoyable day and night. From here it’s a short hop to Ay Eufemia where we spend three nights anchored in the harbour before meeting our Australian friends Simon and Bronwyn (SandB).

There’s a few wasps around and during this time having not long recovered from her sea urchin sting Diane get’s two wasp stings on a finger resulting in some painful swelling!
The night before SandB’s arrival we have a violent thunderstorm with heavy rain and winds well over 30 knots. A charter yacht anchored in front of us drags to only five metres abeam of us but her crew is alert and they safely re-anchor. This is common in strong winds as charter yachts often have light ground tackle and inexperienced crews.
Our plan is to cruise with SandB about 110 miles to Corfu and along the way we’ll be anchoring at some of our favourite places. This is SandB’s first Envoy cruise but they are experienced sailors having raced yacht, owned boats and cruised the Med with other friends, so are very quickly part of the crew with Simon sharing watches from day one.
First stop is just eleven miles away at Foki Bay from where it’s an easy walk or ride by dinghy to Fiskhardo, a great bay surrounded by tavernas and funky shops. Most yachts visiting here and similar harbours go stern-to the quay, but we prefer to anchor nearby so we can swim, enjoy some privacy and avoid the hassles of tangled anchor chains. It’s getting late in the season but there’s a surprisingly high number of boats around.

Great bougainvilleas adorn Fiskhardo house

Envoy anchored in Foki Bay

After a night at nearby Sivota we enter the Lefkas canal and refuel at the marina, taking on 1,325 litres which will be our last major refuel of the year, then anchor in the canal off Lefkas so we can show SandB around the village. After leaving the canal we head north to the mainland village of Parga, always quite special and this visit no exception.

Simon, Laurie and Bronwyn enjoy a coffee at a Parga taverna

Parga’s castle entrance and harbour below

Fiskhardo, Sivota and Parga have been featured in earlier blogs so not detailed here.
The weather is still fine with daytime temperatures in the mid 20s but by night it’s now cool enough to need a blanket on our beds and to wear sweatshirts. The wind is very light – mainly less than 10 knots which is great for motorboat cruising and for calm anchorages.

While anchored in Lakka Bay on Paxxos Island we meet some Australian cruisers – Peter and Colleen from Wild Passion who recently left Turkey. They tell us things are rapidly going downhill there, much worse than is reported in the press, that cruisers are leaving in droves and charter boat operators are moving their boats to other destinations. They were planning to stay another season at Kas Marina but so many cruisers have left that marina management have doubled the fees to maintain their income level, ironically forcing those hardy cruisers unworried by the political situation to leave because they can’t afford to stay.

We spend some time at the mainland anchorage of Mourtos and then Corfu.

Kayakers pass our anchorage at Mourtos

With Envoy safely anchored off Corfu Bronwyn and Di hit the shops while Simon and I explore the Old Fortress, one of two Venetian fortresses that guarded Corfu, an island of huge strategic importance protecting the trade route to the Adriatic Sea. The impressive rock was first fortified by Byzantines during the 6th century and later improved to withstand artillery by the Venetians in the 15th century. Corfu withstood three Turkish sieges in 1571, 1573 and 1716 and remained one of very few areas in the region never taken by Turks. Corfu became an English Protectorate from 1815-64 and the fortress became their garrison.

Corfu’s impressive Old Fortress

A parade of Greek sailors in Corfu although we don’t know what the occasion is

It’s serious enough to involve four priests though

A large cruise ship in the background – many visit Corfu

FOR FOODIES
Laurie, Diane, Bronwyn and Simon enjoying farewell dinner in Corfu at excellent Athos restaurant y discovered by Bronwyn in Trip Advisor

We enjoy an excellent fish soup, with crusty hot fresh bread, mussels and tuna washed down with a local rose wine. They also surprised us with small free tastings served between courses and a tasting tray of desserts. Altogether one of the nicest eateries we’ve been to

 Here SandB leave us after two great weeks with plans made to link up again soon in NZ.

Envoy is currently at Lefkas Marina, our Greek home base as we prepare to leave her for the winter next week and return home for the NZ summer.

As Nikos Kazantzakis’s epic book Zorba the Greek says, “Happy is the man, who before dying, has the opportunity to sail the Aegean Sea.”
We’ve certainly had that opportunity, sharing hundreds of days there in one of the world’s greatest cruising grounds with family and special friends during 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2016.
Crete will always be a special place in our hearts. Spanning across the southern end of the Aegean Sea, Crete is a large island measuring some 260km from west to east and 50km from north to south with three mountain ranges towering to over 2,000 metres. Its topography is extremely rugged with few major inland roads and little traffic outside the main towns.
Talking of traffic, compared to what we are used to home in NZ the driving standard is certainly interesting – much like the rest of Greece. Few drivers seem content to sit behind you and will overtake on blind corners, double white lines or anywhere, often forcing oncoming traffic to move over to the verge. Speed limit signs seem to be a waste of space and there is little traffic law enforcement. Although the law requires helmets to be worn on motorcycles they seem rare and it’s common to see riders smoking a cigarette, talking on their mobile phone and drinking a balancing something on their lap all at the same time. This could also be happening while they ride the wrong way down a one-way street! Despite this we haven’t witnessed any anger, “road rage” or major accidents.
On every spare piece of Cretan land there are olive trees – over 21 million of them in fact and it’s hard to imagine how many trees with poor accessibility are harvested. Large nets are placed under the trees and then the branches are mechanically shaken to bring the olives down. This provides employment during the harvesting time of October to February when the summer tourists have gone.
Crete is very windy and windmills are still extensively used to pump water from bores. Wind farms provide much of the electricity and there are hundreds of these tall, silent wind towers around the island.

It’s now early September and we’re retracing our steps mostly to destinations we’ve already visited both in 2010 and this year, so our Blog postings will only cover any new destinations along with interesting events.
As a southerly wind increases we move to Dhiakofti, a great sheltered bay on the eastern side of Kithera Island with perfect shelter from the south. Later the two Australian couples we met at Soudha arrive in their catamarans during a deluge of heavy rain, part of the same weather system that caused massive floods, sadly with the loss of three lives in nearby Kalamata. Later a third Aussie cat arrives making this an exclusively Antipodean anchorage.

In company with one of the cats, Walanthea we cruise on to Mezapo on the mainland in a rising following easterly wind and when we pass one of the massive capes of the Peloponnisos we encounter strong katabatic winds up to 38 knots on our beam causing the seas to build in minutes from one to 2.5 metres with the top metre breaking. Sheets of spray cover Envoy and worried that our towed RHIB might capsize we turn into the seas until the squalls subside. Later our Australian friends say it’s the roughest sea they’ve ever encountered.

For the first time we anchor off Mezapo, which is rather bleak but offers good shelter from the east. Mezapo has several small coves suitable for shallow draught boats and used to be a haunt of pirates preying on the passing sailing ships. Nowadays it has one small shop doubling as a taverna, a church, a cemetery, and a few dozen houses, many of which are in ruins.

One of Mezapo’s small coves

Envoy and Aussie cat Walanthea anchored at Mezapo

Mezapo

Finakounda is another place we’d never visited before and we anchor here for a night. From the anchorage the village appears to consist only of tavernas lining the seafront but when we go ashore we’re pleasantly surprised to find an interesting main street and seeing a suckling pig roasting on a spit giving off great aromas we quickly can our on-board BBQ plans and enjoy delicious roast pork ashore.

Finakounda viewed from Envoy at anchor

We’d visited Kiparissia in 2010 and head there again as it’s a convenient safe anchorage more or less half way to Cephalonia. This is not a tourist town and its fairly large harbour only has three other boats in it, but we need a Vodafone shop and find one here where our internet connection problem is sorted out in minutes (throughout Greece we’ve always found Vodafone shops have extremely competent and helpful English-speaking staff).

Kiparissia’s large but quiet harbour

Normally you’re not allowed to anchor within a harbour, but nobody seemed to mind here

We leave the Peloponnisos region cruising north-west to Cephalonia in perfect conditions to find another previously unvisited village – Poros and anchor off its beach. It’s a picturesque place but in the early hours of the morning the wind increases, turns on-shore and we have an uncomfortable night requiring an early move the next morning.

Poros’s harbour