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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

Envoy is currently anchored in Ormos Vlikkho, Greece – a secure anchorage waiting for a front with heavy rain and 30 knot winds to pass over. It’s not always sunshine in the Med during Autumn.

Leaving Rethimno we cruise west again to visit another first-time destination – the village of Georgiopoli situated at the mouth of two rivers with the fresh water coming down from the mountains making the anchorage’s water temperature coolish for swimming.
We’re the only boat here and are able to stay one great night before the northerly swell kicks in again making the anchorage untenable. A few passing fishermen comment adversely about our anchoring position but there seems plenty of room for them to pass us safely to reach the river where they moor to the shore. We figure they’re just not used to seeing vessels of Envoy’s size anchored there.

Beautiful tree-lined street in Georgiopoli

This taverna beckons you to come and have a cold beer

Amy and Laurie having breakfast in the courtyard of a shaded taverna

We set off for Ormos Milati, as described in a previous posting, and as usual Envoy is attracting a lot of attention with her distinct and unusual appearance, paravanes out, and flopper-stoppers gently rising and falling. Many people in small craft, and even people swimming come up to us to talk and ask questions.
One man in particular swims out and asks that we join he and his wife and friends for dinner – an invitation we happily accept. Over the next few days we have two great nights with Minoli Spanoucakis, his Greek-American wife Anne, and friends Constantine, Costas, Lilian and others. Minoli used to be Deputy Mayor of the region so is a mine of information. It turns out that Costas is the same guy we met here in 2010 and had dinner with he and his wife. A hospitable lot these Cretans. When we come to pay the bill a great dinner including beer and wine has cost us just 14 Euros (about NZ$22) per head.

Dinner with our new-found Cretan friends

Also in Ormos Milati we meet two Australian couples cruising in their sailing catamarans: Campbell and Debbie from Fremantle aboard “Walanthea” and Brian and Lorraine aboard “Ki”.

Two Australian cats and Envoy anchored at O Milati

With Amy still aboard we cruise for seven and a half hours around the most westerly point of Crete’s north coast to the island of Gramvousa. This is a spectacular area and the island has a couple of bays on its south side, making it reasonably sheltered from the prevailing northerly winds, although at anchorages like this you don’t find perfect shelter.

Envoy anchored off Gramvousa with fortress ruins on top of hill

Crowning the island are the ruins of a huge Venetian fortress built in 1579, triangular in shape, with each side 1km long. It was the last Cretan stronghold to fall to the Turks in 1692, having been held for three years by 3,000 Cretans. In the early 19th century the area became a haven for pirates until an Anglo/French expedition rooted them out in 1828.

A view across the castle’s interior

Envoy at anchor viewed from track leading up to castle

On rocks separating the two bays is the wreck of the ship, Dimitrios P, about 40 metres long and wrecked during a storm in 1968 while carrying bags of cement to Africa. Amy and I snorkel around the wreck noting that hundreds of solidified bags of cement are still clearly visible along with the engine, drive train and huge bronze propeller. The wreck’s condition has deteriorated since our last visit in 2010 though, with large superstructure sections having collapsed.

Gramvousa’s shipwreck

Shipwreck with Envoy in background

We spent two nights there with mid-morning to late afternoon ferries bringing literally hundreds of day-trippers to the island, but after the last of the ferries leave it’s very peaceful, with only a fishing boat moored in the bay one night.
We go ashore for drinks on the deserted beach and Amy and Diane sit in a rock pool by the water’s edge. Di accidentally touches some kind of sea urchin that stings her, embedding dozens of extremly fine hairy prongs into her hand. It’s still sore after Amy and Di spend a couple of hours pulling the hairs out and takes several days to fully recover.

The scene of Di’s sea urchin sting

Looking across to Balos from Gramvousa’s summit

Amy had told us about a products called noodles that provide great flotation when swimming and we used these for the first time this season.

You can wrap the noodle around your chest to provide buoyancy in the water

Laurie and Amy swimming with noodles

It’s great to spend a couple of weeks of quality time with Amy and we enjoy lots of swims, walks ashore, candle-lit BBQ’s aboard Envoy, snorkelling.

Back at Soudha Bay we see some gypsies as we approach the shore in our RHIB. We know what’s coming and as soon as we reach the jetty, the gypsy children approach us with arms outstretched begging while their parents watch. We don’t give them anything, but are then worried about leaving our RHIB unattended there as the children start to crowd around it as we leave, so we play it safe and move the RHIB to a more secure location where there are fisherman nearby to keep an eye on it.

We leave Crete the day after Amy returns to London starting our 200 mile journey to Cephalonia where we’ll meet Australian friends Simon and Bronwyn in two weeks. That day we cruise 16 hours in great conditions to Ay Nikolau on the southern side of Kithera Island and do a partial night cruise, dropping the anchor at 0015 hours the next day.