Season 2 is off and running! I’m trying to be positive!

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Season 2 started in late April again this year, and all winter long we had planned to start out with a trip to Kušadasi port, Türkiye, partly to get the Fish out of the EU for a bit to restart our VAT clock. (If the boat is in the EU for 18 consecutive months, we would owe 20% of the boat’s purchase price in Value Added Tax. NOT an option, needless to say.) We needed some metalwork done as well, and Tim and Karina had an excellent reference for a contractor there.

Life had other plans for us. Our biggest expenses since we bought the boat, a new headsail, mainsail, and Oxley parasailor, had not arrived in Mytilini as planned. We knew we were risking it with our late parasailor order from Germany, but the head and main sails should have reached us in plenty of time. When we checked the order status on the date they were supposed to arrive, they were still in production – in China. We were also waiting on the last out of stock items in an order we’d placed from SVB, a marine supply store in Germany. The days ticked by with no deliveries, and we finally knew we had to radically alter our plans.

We were on a tight deadline, something we know better than to have. We needed to get to the Porto Cheli marina in the northern Peloponnese in less than three weeks, when we had three international trips between the two of us that would eat up the last three weeks of May. Finally, we decided Kušadasi had to go. We let the sails companies and SVB know to send the goods to the Porto Cheli marina instead of Mytilini.

This timing was dumb. We should have canceled Kušadasi in mid-April and simply gotten the wind in our sails early enough to do the day in Ayvalik and then have more time to enjoy the Aegean crossing. Hindsight.

Our 18-month VAT clock wasn’t up until the fall, but we wouldn’t be able to get out of the EU unless we took the opportunity to pop over to Türkiye now. So the first thing we had to do was go to Ayvalik, 17 nm northeast of us. As soon as we had decent weather (April 22^nd, to be exact) we checked out of Greece in Mytilini and headed out into the afternoon with a light wind following, and mere trepidation (not terror) in our souls. We’re off!

We had booked space in the Setur marina in Ayvalik so that their employee could act as our agent for checking in and out of Türkiye, and we would have the receipt for the night in the marina to show that the boat had been out of the EU for at least a day. But first we pulled alongside the ferry dock to go through the checking-in formalities. We then arranged with the agent to meet us early the next morning to go through the same process for checking out and headed to the marina for the night. An otherwise uneventful evening passed, punctuated by my sighting of a Syrian Woodpecker peering down from the coach roof of a motor yacht closer to shore. Pretty sure Peter didn’t find it as energizing as I did, but then I don’t get as worked up about boats as he does either.

When we woke the next morning and didn’t find our agent breathlessly waiting for us, we called and learned that alas, it was a public holiday, and none of the government personnel needed to check us out were at work. Hmmm. And we didn’t know that yesterday? A little wheedling, possibly a little whining, and eventually the necessary personnel arrived, and our agent and we shared pleasantries and passports with them. All good. But slow leaving for Mytilini, where we needed to check back into Greece, and when the serpentine on the port engine gave up the ghost in the middle of the bay, Peter found a new one and installed it, eating up more of the day. We went through the same bureaucracy drill back in Mytilini, although this time the person on duty at the customs office got twisted about the fact that we hadn’t some piece of paper officially updated in more than six months (a rule we’d never heard of), and it took a bit to convince him that we were in fact completely legal.

By the time we were free to go, the wind was up to 22 knots and blowing us onto the quay. We’d planned to spend the night down “around the corner” on the east side of the bay of Géras in southeastern Lesvos, where there was a reputedly excellent restaurant and good protection from the wind. It took some doing (and possibly a little gel coat off our sugar scoop) to get off the quay against the wind, and then a lot of doing to go head to wind down to Géras. We didn’t pull into Skala Loutron until dusk was almost night. The anchor hooked. Relief. No one else in the anchorage. Relief. The resto was still open. Relief. A quiet night in the end.

We made Marmaro, Chios, the next early evening after another very long head to wind slog. As I wondered in my journal, “Can’t decide if this was the worst day of sailing to date or if somehow there’s been a worse one. Pretty sure it’s the worst…. Just the starboard engine today. No clue what’s wrong with port. Nose to wind in heavy swell and 15-20 knots, We fell off and motor sailed for a few hours, but we were still head to swell and bashed ceaselessly. Enough ship traffic to make me jumpy. NINE hours after we left Skala Loutron for a four-hour sail to Chios we arrived in the dark and spent half an hour trying to set the hook.”

It was rainy and grey, and we reminisced about being there last November on our last night of our very first season. Fortunately, we had a calm night this time too – but in our preparations to leave the following morning we found our port engine overheating. We’d already cleaned out the strainers in the saltwater intakes after Tim warned on the Mytilini Mariners group chat that spending the winter in the trash strewn water in the Mytilini marina could wreak havoc on our boats’ strainers and filters. Peter checked them again – nothing. A call for suggestions out to the group chat resulted in Frank’s suggestion to connect our air horn to some tubing, stick the tube into the intake pipe and use the force of the air to blow out whatever might be blocking the pipe. Magic.

After reviving the port engine, we headed south in jaunty 20 knots winds coming straight at us. Instead of getting to Chios town as hoped, we got as far as Lekgada and Peter made the unilateral and very welcome decision to call it and hope for better winds and seas the next morning. It was a brilliant move. Lekgada is a town in a small bay about halfway from Marmaro to Chios town, and the town quay was wide open. We slid in alongside and tied up with help from a small army of local kids – next to an octopus drying rack, which was traumatizing for all concerned (the octopi and me) – and after an early dinner we took a long loop walk around the town and up into the hills above. So beautiful. Lushly green, thick with citrus, pomegranate, and stone fruit trees, vines and flowers and blooming bushes. The harbor was clear, and there wasn’t a scrap of trash in sight. The sun set with a golden light that made me think I’d never see a storm cloud again. (Ha!)

We did the following four days straight motoring into the wind to make the distances we needed to give ourselves a little extra time when we got to the southern Cyclades before hustling on to Porto Cheli. There were several beautiful anchorages along the way, and we were alone in most of them, including Limnionis in Samos, an unnamed beach on the south coast of Agathonisi, and then Makronisi, Arki. The fourth day we stopped for a couple of hours on the south side of Agia Marina, on the west coast of Leros, for Peter to dinghy in for provisioning. Such a picturesque town – whitewashed buildings, castle ruins and a string of windmills along the ridge above. (I couldn’t go with him because I couldn’t get into the dinghy. My back, managing to get worse every day, was by then completely wrecked. I couldn’t sit at all – spent my days either standing at the helm or lying down nearby – so even if I could have gotten into it the ride itself would have been excruciating.) Later that day we got to Vlichadia, a charming small town on the southwestern tip of Kalymnos, our last stop before heading west.

By this time, even knowing we would take more time in the Cyclades, I was becoming frustrated by the feeling that we were just going through the motions. We weren’t getting off the boat at night – even if we found ourselves in a bay with an open taverna, even if my back were better, we were exhausted and already preparing for the next day’s early start. It was cruising with purpose. I prefer cruising without purpose, without deadlines, without pressure to get somewhere so we can get somewhere else.

We had spent a single night on Samos – one of the islands we’d hoped to have time to explore – as well as the rest of the string of Dodecanese islands we blew through last fall, then stopped at Kalymnos. No Kos, no Rhodes. That’s ok, I thought determinedly, we’ll have time in the southern Cyclades.

And honestly, the weather really sucked. “Windy” doesn’t capture the full inescapability of it, or the crazy-making, relentless washing machine of swell and waves. And it was cold – puffy weather even if the sun was out, and if the sun wasn’t out, you’d better have a sweater underneath too. People start their seasons early to enjoy the peace of quiet anchorages, spring sunshine, and pristine waters. It’s an amazing feeling to come into a turquoise bay and see that you’re the only boat there, and the only thing on shore is a herd of goats – and that feeling can be difficult to find once June comes around and the charter boats start mobbing. So, we start, expecting the weather gods to cooperate and life to be like it was at the end of last season – swimmable waters, warm sunshine, and empty seas. But this spring at least, the weather gods seemed to be just messing with us.

I had to remind myself that last May we were off the boat for a couple of weeks – we met Mia in Athens for a few days, then Peter went to the states, and Mia and I went to visit my sister Molly in Mallorca. During that time the Fish was in Erikoussa under the watchful eye of George the harbormaster, and Erikoussa and the rest of the northern Ionian were simply thrashed by storms – one of our spring lines even snapped during one of them. So, it’s not like crap weather is unusual in Greece in early May. What did we expect?

We struck out of Vlichadia early the next morning. As soon as we got around the corner and into open water the wind whipped up close on our starboard bow, and the swell picked up. Two hours later, the last of our spare serpentines blew, this time in the starboard engine. We had one engine and a reefed genoa to get us the remaining eight hours to Astypalea, an outlying island in the west of the southern Cyclades. (Not a problem in and of itself, but what if we lost the port engine again as well??) And with 3-4 meter swell we were both seasick, gnawing on slices of raw ginger and hoping the scopolamine patches would kick in before we had to hit the rails.

It was a very long day of very rough, wide-open seas. But eventually we reached Exo Vathy, a hurricane hole in northeast Astypalea, that was well protected and the bottom grabbed our anchor like deep, wet cement. The wind still beat on us, but the sun shone, we were feeling better, and we’d made it. It’s just that we still realllly needed our port engine to work again. We needed to find more serpentines, and Astypalea and the southern Cyclades aren’t hubs of marine chandleries. Santorini might have them – but then we’d have a huge slog back up to Porto Cheli, and we weren’t sure we wanted to go so far south. The only other place that had them in stock was a chandlery in Ermopoulis, the capitol city of Siros. In the northern Cyclades. And we needed to pick them up before the weeklong Easter holidays kicked in – in four days.

Maria’s Taverna in Exo Vathy

We tried to leave the next morning but found the wind and swell outside the bay worse than the day before. We couldn’t face it. But tick, tock, tick, tock. Three days to go. (So we had an early dinner at Maria’s, a remarkable little restaurant onshore. When in doubt, eat. And/or drink.) We left early the morning after that, and made Manganari, Ios, 10 hours later. And that was the last we saw of the southern Cyclades. Another 10-hour day got us to Ermopoulis. We chose to anchor slightly south of the city, which we knew would mean that the next morning we would get our bikes out, go ashore, and ride into city. And I’m so glad we did. It was a gorgeous ride, and then we found a delightful team of marine engineers at Cyclades Diesel Marine waiting for us with new serpentines in hand. It almost made up for mostly missing out on the most beautiful string of islands in the Aegean.

The Holy Grail.

We also did some provisioning at an unusually well stocked AB supermarket and then rode back to the boat with our booty and time for a nap. We’d planned a nice dinner out later and a good night’s sleep. Instead, we woke from our nap to a completely different day: grey, very windy, and very cold. A recheck of PredictWind’s forecast showed 35-40 knots would be blowing us onto the beach that night, so we quickly lifted anchor, headed around the corner to the south coast, and tucked up into a nice little inlet and the town of Vari. Much better protected, and warm and dry. We spent two nights in Vari and on the second day had Easter dinner at a taverna on the beach. Two days in one spot – by choice!! Be still my beating heart….

But we needed to keep on. We had a relatively straight shot across the Saronic Gulf, first to Potamia, Kithnos, then Agios Giorgios, a tiny slash of an island running along the middle of the Saronic, wind turbines lining its ridges and nothing but goats on shore. It was a turning point. Sitting out on the bow in the setting sun, I got all choked up about leaving “the islands.” Tomorrow we would be on mainland Greece again, and the empty anchorages and associated peace would be a thing of the past. We would find some relative quiet along the very southern Peloponnese, but overall, from now until the South Pacific there would simply be a lot more people and a lot more boats. Not my cuppa, so it was hard to swallow.

Kithnos and Agios Giorgios

It helped that Ermioni, our first stop on the mainland, was adorable and Drougas, one of its bakeries, had the best bitter chocolate gelato I’ve ever tasted. (We didn’t know it at the time, but our wish to see Ermioni again would soon come true.)

An easy hop south and west from Ermioni, and we made Porto Cheli about mid-day the next morning. A well-managed marina, a spot alongside for the Fish, great marineros, and even a short walk to the service block: this would be my home for the next week or so while Peter travelled.

After Peter left my days in Porto Cheli passed quickly – lots of cleaning and prepping for Peter’s mom, Suzy and sister Brooke (who would be arriving as we returned to the boat later in the month), long, breathtaking bike rides along the coast, and installing the mosquito screens for the salon doors. The latter has become a specialty of mine. It involves cutting down the smallest available size to the weird sizes of our doors – generally shorter and narrower. But because the edges of the screens already have the Velcro sewn on, you have to cut out panels from the center and then sew the edges back on to the remainders – by hand of course, since a machine won’t work on the mesh alone. Much measuring and cutting and hand sewing later, I was rewarded with two sturdy, reliable screen doors with long magnets running along the middle edges and strong Velcro adhering to the frames around the doors. Bombproof, but more importantly, mosquito proof.

About halfway through my week of solitude the shit hit the fan with the new sails. Turned out DHL had been trying to reach us for weeks, and the receptionist at the marina office told me they were going to send the sails back to China if we didn’t get in touch with them immediately. We’d also heard tales of the nightmares of Greek customs, but for some reason didn’t think importing a few expensive sails would mean we would have one too. With help from the Mytilini Mariners group chat I soon had an agent to help me get together all the documentation, and once that was done, I taxied to the customs office in the next big town inland for the required stamps on all the paperwork. All we needed now was to pay a very large VAT bill, then it would all clear customs and be on its way to us. Our nightmare was that we hadn’t realized that VAT was 24% of the value of the sails AND another 12% customs duty. Cough. Ouch.

Peter returned, and we moved out of the marina to regroup (that is, save a few bucks) before I left the next day. Along the way, Peter took down the dinghy go under the bow to straighten and untwist the new, pain in the ass bridle, and then unbeknownst to me, hooked up the dinghy again to the lowered davits (not just bridle-towed behind) and, pointing across the bay, said, “Let’s go over there.” So I did. A minute later there was an almighty upset – noise, movement, a slam – in the stern, and I looked around from the helm and saw that the dinghy was OMG ON THE DAVITS and OH SHIT, WAS UPSIDE DOWN. Aaaaand the day couldn’t get much worse.

Peter immediately started on remediation methods – salt water in an outboard is often catastrophic – and I looked up Yamaha outboard mechanics in the area. The only ones listed were back in Ermioni. It was late Saturday afternoon, I had to catch a ferry to Athens from Porto Cheli at 5:45 the following morning, and Ermioni was two hours’ sail on a good day. But the mechanic assured us they could do the work, and told us to get moving. So we did.

It was dusk by the time we arrived. The town quay, where she’d told us to dock the boat, was fairly open, so we started backing into a space – then noticed a man shouting and waving at us from further down and across the L of the quay. We couldn’t understand a word, but eventually realized he was telling us to come where he was and dock there. It turned out our mechanic, Vasos, and her husband Theodoris, also a mechanic, had decided to have dinner with Vasos’ best friend from childhood Sula, and Sula’s husband Paniotis, and wait for our arrival. Paniotis had taken it upon himself to redirect us, bellowing “Colorado! Colorado!” while the rest of them made fun of his red pants (and continued to rib him about the rest of the evening). (Paniotis refused to be cowed and was proud of them – and he was thrilled when I told him they were the famous “Nantucket Red” color from the fancy schmancy island off the coast of New England). Theodoris supervised the removal of the motor from the dinghy and sent it away with an underling, then Vasos told us to come sit with them for a glass of wine – she said we looked like we needed it. She was absolutely right. Four hours and enough food and drink to feed a southern bridal party later we all hugged our new best friends good night and Peter and I toddled a few feet away to the boat. Of all the ways that day could have ended, I’m convinced it was the best.

I caught the ferry in Ermioni on its way from Porto Cheli the next morning, and Peter stayed on in Ermioni until Vasos and Theodoris finished fixing the motor a few days later. He single-handed back to Porto Cheli to leave the boat in the marina again while he travelled to Montenegro for another conference. Meanwhile I ferried to Kea to meet an old, dear friend from England for a few days. We hadn’t seen each other since 1997, when we were each conducting research in the former Lebowa homeland of northern South Africa. She’d come in for some work in Athens the week before, then to Kea for another week to lead a mindfulness workshop for civil servants on the island. She was just finishing the workshop as I arrived and had booked rooms for us at a farm about 40 minutes outside the port.

This “farm” requires more description. La Maison Vert Amande (lamaisonvertamande.com) is the labor of love of a French woman, Geraldine, and her Greek husband George. Geraldine has lived on Kea for 25 years and started taking in guests about 8 years earlier. She has two rooms for rent, both with their own entrances, small kitchens and bathrooms. Trish stayed in the larger space off the side of the house, and I was assigned a separate apartment behind the house and up a small hill. Both apartments – the entire house! – were exquisite in ways that I’m convinced only a French woman can achieve. Whimsical décor, rustic provincial furniture, practicality married to thoughtful and chic, and completely comfortable.

It is also a hobby farm that boasts a donkey, turkeys, chickens, rabbits, and two emus. We didn’t interact with the rabbits since they are raised entirely for food, but the emus were particularly endearing.

Seriously. They were such characters. Those big beautiful, beady eyes!

And George is a third-generation beekeeper from Kea. He has hundreds of hives, most of them lining the terraces of the back yard, and he sells his thyme honey worldwide. As if that all isn’t enough, the farm is also about 200 meters’ walk from a pristine sand beach.

Trish and I had a wonderful couple of days catching up on the last 25 years of our lives, and it was hard to leave her alone in paradise for the rest of the week – although I’m sure that was precisely what she wanted and needed by that point. I’m hanging on to the happy coincidence that our petsit in England in August is relatively close to her in Oxford – after all this time I get to see her twice in one year!

Next stop, my flight out of Athens to Boston, and then a late evening bus to Portland, Maine. I spent the next morning walking around Portland – in addition to all the downtown yarn stores and several thrift stores, I walked into the Portland Museum of Art and saw a fabulous exhibit of baskets by Jeremy Frey, a seventh generation Passamaquoddy basket maker that made my eyes pop out of my head (http://portlandmuseum.com/woven).

Peggy flew in that afternoon, and as soon as we picked up the rental car we were hurtling out of Portland and heading to Lewiston for the Bates College graduation weekend. We were in a particular hurry that afternoon because the graduate, Peggy’s son Jeremy, was being honored along with the other inductees to the College Key at 5 pm. We made it in time to hear his leadership achievements described by the dean – thanks to the fact that his last name starts with “S” and not, say, “C.” And that pace set the tone for the remainder of the weekend!

Pegs had booked the whole Blue Heron Farm (http://blueheronfarmandretreat.com), about ten miles north of Lewiston, for the family coming in for the festivities, and we took over the two safari sized tents and two small cabins for three nights. I don’t know how I got so lucky to spend my travels this spring in the most extraordinary places, but Blue Heron was as fabulous as Maison Vert, even if they couldn’t be less similar. In addition to luxe, comfortable digs (Pegs and I shared one of the tents), we had breakfast every morning in a huge old, beautifully refurbished barn, and cocktails whenever we had a chance in the Adirondack chairs along the river, listening to birdsong and the braying of a very excitable rescue donkey. There was also a rescue horse and cow and a second donkey, as well as a gaggle of geese, and innumerable chickens. It was downright chilly at night in the tents, but thick comforters ensured the best cozy, deep sleep, and I looked forward every day to sinking into bed at night.

Ron, Aunt Marsha, Condro, Lizzie, Ndaru, and Jeremy, the man of the hour!

Graduation was highlighted by a commencement speech by Mary Louise Kelly of NPR fame – a speech we all thoroughly enjoyed – and of course, the moments that Jeremy was walking across the stage to receive his diploma. Before we knew it, he was a college graduate – last I checked he was in kindergarten – and the chaos of moving him out of his dorm ensued. A last-minute U-Haul trailer was secured (in Concord, NH, two hours away, but we also got a truck in Lewiston to get everything to Concord) and resolved all the concerns about his four years of accumulated possessions fitting into his Subaru Forester.

The graduate! With Mom, Ron, and me after the ceremony and then after the move out.

After a celebratory dinner at the Farm that night we left early the next morning for the Portland airport. I caught the bus to Logan and boarded my flight a few hours later. And just like that, I was back in Athens and walking into huge hello hugs with Brooke and Suzy in the terminal. It was May 28^th, and I was ready for our second season to REALLY start.