Grace Notes

This seems so long ago, but with limited internet access in Turkey it has taken a while to get up to speed. So the weekend I am referring to was the 8th and 9th October. We were aware that the storm was coming and chose Pedi on Simi to see out the event. The forecast was for Force 8 from the south blowing up on the Saturday, with respite on the Sunday, and blowing up again on the Monday, and finally blowing itself out by Tuesday morning. In preparation we laid our 20kg Rocna and 20kg Delta in tandem and pointing south the direction the wind should have come from. I snorkelled them to ensure they were both in, and our only concern on retiring to bed on Saturday night, was that we seemed a little close to the end of the short quay when we swung around. So we picked 5 meters of chain up and went to bed. At 2.45am we were woken by the noise of the wind, which had finally arrived. The whole bay was up as yacht after yacht began to drag their anchor. Some only needed to re-ancho...

Monday night was hard work. We were at anchor, in a reasonably sheltered, shallow bay on the south side of the North Evia Gulf. View Larger Map At around 2330, we were about to turn in for the night. I did a final check on deck, only to witness a fantastic display of sheet lightning to the north, on the other side of Evia. We watched it for ten minutes. We became fairly confident it was not heading in our direction, but we know a thunderstorm can bring strong winds so decided to lay a second anchor. The ten minutes spent enjoying the spectacle cost us dearly. Lesson 1 : If a thunderstorm is about, don't dawdle - get prepared. We laid our second anchor, which is a 16kg Delta plus about 25kg of chain - not an easy thing to lug about. While doing so, it became apparent that the chain of the primary Rocna anchor was caught round something on the bottom. It looked to us (in the pitch black - a new moon), that the two chains were somehow entangled, but in thinking about it aft...

There is a small road bridge joining Evia to the main land which needs to be passed to proceed up to the Northern Sporades. Having read about it, it all sounded reasonably worrying with talk of 6-7 knots of tide at springs as you pass through the bridge and yachts being left out by the call by the port police and it all having to be done in the dark, as they only open the bridge between 10pm and 4am to avoid disrupting the traffic as much as possible. So we went and paid our dues and were given very clear instructions by the Port Police, who seemed very well organised and told us to expect the call about 2.00am, which would be around slack water. The whole event passed off pretty much as they said it would. We were prepared early and rigged the boat ready for an along side whilst we still had light. The Port Police called each boat individually to stand by at about 2.30am and then called each boat again individually to proceed through the bridge in turn. We went through, watche...

Crazy season is approaching, and we're close to Athens, which means money circulating in little ships. This joy... ...kept us awake with its main generator. They turned turn the thing off when the Sun came up, so I guess it was only needed for the ridiculous quantity of deck lighting. There was one consolation. She made the neighbouring stinkies look small, which must have annoyed them.

Just a quick note about the 2 days and 3 nights we spent in Plitra. First of all the place is a tiny holiday resort, which was virtually closed for the off session. Beginning built in a grid formation with wide deserted roads and a stop signs on every corner gave it a strangely American feel. The one mini market was shut and so we had to cycle the 4 km into the next village to get supplies. Unfortunately we were out of the heavy stuff, all kinds of liquid, and so two trips were necessary. Lucky for us it was basically flat to get there and the wind was with us on the way home. There was very little bandwidth in Plitra. Phil tried his best to gain internet access by pegging the dongle in front of a metal sieve and holding up in different directions. He claimed that this improved things enough for us to get the weather but not much else. We ate in the nearest taverna of the two, which was directly at the end of the key. It was a nice place. No menu as it was out of session b...

The recent extension to the breakwater at Kyparissia is good - without it we couldn't have stayed here last night and would have had a long day to Pylos yesterday. New harbours with big concrete quays definitely need to be treated with suspicion until proven. As forecast, we had strong South Westerlies, which veered to North Westerlies in the middle of the night. We suffered from significant swell on the West quay, and were up through the night tending the lines. We're now in the market for some better string... and a couple more of these (We shipped ours from Spain , which made them a little pricey, but they work really well.) Things looked a little better on the East quay where Norna Biron was be sitting pretty. On closer investigation this morning, they had an anchor out abeam which pulled them clear of the quay. The silver lining was that we took a day off from moving, and walked up to Kyparissa castle. Absolutely stunning views. We're at anchor in the h...