The home stretch.
Peggy’s departure signaled the end of our lollygagging and the beginning of our efforts to get to Mytilini on or about November 1st. Because of an unavoidable stop we needed to make in Naxos while Peter went to Montenegro, we knew we were going to have to move almost every day to make that timeline. Mother Nature had other ideas though – this became a recurring theme in the coming weeks in the Aegean – and instead of leaving Milos, we ended up stern-to on the town quay for a couple of days as heaving weather moved through. With a more positive forecast we finally left Adamantas – and made it as far as Kimolos, the next island to the east, in increasingly heavy winds and seas. We’d hoped to make Sifnos – halfway to Paros – but ended up in a safe anchorage with crystal turquoise waters clearer than anything we’d seen to date. It was a lovely stop, even if just for one night.
Two days later we made Paros, after a night anchoring off Antiparos, and fell in love with yet another charming Greek town. The narrow, winding walkways took us all over the old city of Parikia and, enchanted, we explored for hours. We decided to spend another day renting a car and seeing the rest of the island, but I ended up rolling my ankle on a hike the next morning and our one extra day morphed into three.
But the ankle improved, and we had our day in the car going first northeast from Parikia to the touristy Naoussa, then down the east coast to the stunning, almost empty Molos beach with a wide stretch of sand bottomed shallow water all along. We had a good swim and sat in the sun, then drove west to Lefkes, the former capital of Paros, for a late lunch. The town sprawls along a mountainside, and its narrow walkways lose and gain elevation around every corner. Like the rest of the island, it was remarkably uncrowded, and we enjoyed a few hours of exploring the beautiful old town.
The day before we left Paros for Naxos, the ancient Dyneema line that raises and lowers the dinghy via an electric winch, which had been growing increasingly frayed in places, finally snapped. Not to say I told you so, mind you. Luckily it was as we were lowering the dinghy, and Peter did a surprisingly easy fix by pulling newer line off the spool in the coach roof and retying it to the anchor bracket. He also had a Denver friend bring a new Dyneema line to him at the event in Montenegro. Mischief managed.
Our passage to Naxos was fraught. First, we lost one of our shorelines when the unsecured end dropped off the stern, caught in our wake and completely unspooled behind us. Oooops. After a quick 180 and dash back, we grabbed the [floating] line with a boat hook, and reeled it in – no harm done, but an unnerving surprise. And not 15 minutes later the port engine warning lights started up – the engine was overheating. The starboard engine got us to an anchorage just north of the Naxos marina where once Peter jumped in to have a closer look, he found the saltwater intake full of calcified tunnels built by the colony of sea worms that were squatting there. He chipped them out and we were back in business. The despair – no, let’s be clear, the terror I’d been fighting since it died was instantly relieved: we wouldn’t have to dock with only one engine. We then found space in the marina – another big relief, since they don’t take reservations and Peter was leaving the next day for Montenegro.
I’ve always found time on the boat enjoyable when Peter is away, and Naxos was no exception. What a gorgeous town. The old castle dominates the hillside above the marina, and a narrow spit leads north of the quay to a non-island dedicated to the unfinished Temple of Apollo. I spent days walking through the alleys of the castle, exploring shops and restaurants, and yes, shopping and eating. I walked to the town beach south of the marina, and over the castle hill to a nice grocery store on the other side of town. Toured the Folk Museum, did some watercolors, knitted, ate gelato, watched sunsets from under the Temple of Apollo with Aperol Spritzes in hand, and generally loved my life.
One of my favorite aspects of Naxos castle was the painted murals….
Peter got back from a very successful event in Montenegro with the Balkan Tech Fund, and after some provisioning, laundry, and boat maintenance, we spent our last night at a classical guitar concert. I wasn’t familiar with AirBnB events, but saw a flyer tacked to a board in the castle and decided it was something we needed to try. The guitar player picked our group of nine up in an ancient van from a central spot in town, then drove us 15 minutes or so into the mountains outside of town to his family’s estate. The old house’s lintel read 1509, and he pointed out the back garden, both of which they rent out for weddings. He then led us into the old olive press off the courtyard of the house and explained the workings before sitting down on his stool and beginning to play. The acoustics in the small room off the press were excellent, and between the ambiance and the quality of the playing, we were transported. He took a break about an hour later, and in the courtyard his mother served us wines, breads, olives, and cheeses, all made by their neighbors around the mountainside. The whole evening was magical, and I finally felt like I was ready to leave Naxos. I’d seen it all.
When using a chart plotter, an instrument in pretty much every boat over about 20 feet these days, it’s really hard to go the wrong way. Unless you’ve zoomed in so much that you have no context for the direction or other land masses you might be heading toward. That explains part of it, but I’d clearly been in a marina long enough to have lost my own sense of direction entirely. That cost us two wasted hours the morning we left Naxos – I was most of the way back to the north coast of Paros before Peter came up and recognized what was happening. It could have been one of those sheepish “oops,” except that in those two hours the southerly wind had strengthened from 5-6 knots to 22-24 knots, and now that we were heading back to the islands south of Naxos, we were bashing into it the whole way down. D-oh!
At the end of the unnecessarily long day, we were rewarded with a stunning, empty anchorage on Upper Kato, Koufanisi, home of the Ksymlopatis Caves. Peter spent the rest of the afternoon snorkeling among them, and I enjoyed the peace and beauty of our surroundings.
Next morning we motored around to the larger Pori bay next door and found a couple of other boats, but it was essentially a giant turquoise swimming pool with plenty of room. Swam twice there – before and after lunch. A few hours later we were anchored at the bottom of Gramvoussa Islet off the west coast of Amorgos. The rip-roaring drunk day trippers who swarmed on the beach left about 17:30, which opened it up for our snorkeling, exploring the beach and the crumbly, mille-feuille texture of its huge sandstone walls, and walking up to the little Orthodox church on the ridge separating our inlet from the next one over. We ended the evening with Aperol Spritzes and a cheese and charcuterie plate for dinner. One of our favorites.
On our way across the north coast of Amorgos, I learned how to overlay radar on our charts! For the first time, we encountered a giant, very dense cloud bank at the entrance to the relatively narrow bay of Katapola, and we needed to get in to Katapola. It was eerie and strange – boats going in and out of the bay would appear and disappear as if they were going through a door. Fortunately, the bank dissipated by the time we got to the entrance of the bay, but it was a very effective educational moment. We were having dinghy motor issues, yet again. Peter was able to fix it in the quiet of the bay though, and we took some time to walk around the small town…
… and then continued on our way to an anchorage off Nikouria Islet near the northeast end of Amorgos.
Amorgos is the easternmost island in the Cyclades, which as we’d learned over the previous few weeks, are justifiably famous for their beauty and excellent cruising grounds, We passed out of the Cyclades and into the Dodecanese islands the following day and ended up off Plati, a small island between Pserimos and southern Kalymnos, and spent a beautiful afternoon of – surprise! – swimming in clear turquoise waters without another boat in sight.
Leros was the next island north, and having seen on noforeignland.com that Chris and Christine of Stray Kitty were in “residence” in Lakki, we got in touch and let them know we were headed in. And in true Stray Kitty fashion, they had the party ready when we got there. While Peter had to work, I spent the evening trying to keep up with Chris (rather than Christine), which cost me a very sore head and queasy stomach in the morning. As I noted in my journal, “Christ. I haven’t felt this bad since the last time we spent an evening on the Kitty back in June in Lakka!”
We tried to head north that next morning but didn’t make it far out of the Lakki bay before turning around and finding our spot in the anchorage again. Very rough seas, very upset stomach, but mostly it was due to our port engine sounding like it was going to ‘splode, Lucy. After much tinkering, cleaning, and eliminating possibilities, Peter found it needed yet another new fan belt. The previous had only lasted a couple of months!
We made it to Archangelos Islet off the north coast of Leros the following day and had a lovely afternoon of swimming, snorkeling, napping, laundry, and relaxing. (I throw laundry in there just to remind myself that it’s well, always there.) A quick hop the next day took us to Papandria Beach on the south coast of Leipsoi. It was a beautiful spot, and we spent much of the day walking up over the hills into the town of Lipsi for exploration and lunch. But it was now the end of October. We reckoned we were the only tourists on the entire island at this point, and few shops or restaurants were open. In fact, in Lipsi on the 30th of October, there was precisely one shop with a small restaurant open on the quay, and we took advantage of it. We explored the Chora after that and found it delightfully compact and charming – I even found myself wishing it were a little earlier in the fall so we could experience the small tavernas and bakeries and shops.
But I had also come to the realization that I was very close to being done with cruising for the year. The season was now stretching into the first week of November, and I wanted to be tucked up in a marina again, not moving every day. I loved the walk on Leipsoi and was ready to have dry land off the back of my boat and the option to walk wherever and for however long I wanted again. And though we’d been anchoring in gorgeous places, I was starting to feel like we were skimming the surface of the Dodecanese in particular, but to some extent the Cyclades as well. And finally, our slip in Lesvos was still several long days away, and nasty weather was forecast for much of the next week. Most urgently, we needed to get to the north coast of Icaria within a couple of days to wait out a southerly that was supposed to come through.
We reached Armenestis, Icaria two days later, and found a gorgeous, wide beach and beautiful sandy bottom, and not another yacht in sight. We dove on our well dug in anchor, snorkeled in the increasingly chilly water, visited the turtles in the pond behind the beach, had dinner in town at the one open taverna, and fed the dozens of stray cats that thronged below us as I tossed cut-up bits of my dry tasteless chicken off the balcony.
When the predicted thunderstorm didn’t materialize the next day, we worried that now it was too late to get to Chios before the bigger storm moved in tomorrow and decided to stay put and lay down more chain. We swam in the brilliant sun – and high winds – the next morning and saw that the 35 meters we had out was lifting all the way back to the anchor. We immediately put out 20 more, and by the time the storm passed we had out almost 70. In the meantime, though, we woke at about 1:30 the next morning to howling wind. We were being hammered, and it didn’t let up until much later in the day. The smallest of our three front porch cushions was gone, the SUP bungees were broken, and it was barely still on the boat, and our helm enclosure had blown out again. Peter sat up all night on anchor watch until I relieved him at 8, but neither of us slept. I lay in bed watching Instagram reels at top volume so I couldn’t hear the roar of the wind as much – I was finding it very unnerving. Later that day, the wind slowly lessened, and the relief of being able to hear each other and our own thoughts flooded me. Since we needed to give the seas a chance to calm down the next day, we settled in for a good night’s sleep knowing there would be no reason to wake up early to move on again.
The next morning broke calm and bright, and out of curiosity we dove on the anchor again – and it was out of sight. The chain just stretched out and disappeared, and the anchor was completely covered with drifted sand – just a big lump under the otherwise flat expanse of sandy bottom. We spent the day relaxing, still recovering from the exhaustion that follows stressful days. And the next day it took some doing, but we got our anchor up and put Marmaro, Chios in our chart plotter. Gorgeous, gorgeous day. Light winds and following seas for nine hours, and we reached Marmaro about half an hour before sunset. The water was glass, and we sat peacefully in the quiet, sipping rosé from a 1.5-liter plastic bottle, and thinking about how our first season would end when we reached Mytilini tomorrow, November 6th.
The trip north held no surprises, just a lush, beautiful island coming into focus off our port bow, and Oh SHIT – why is that big ship following us? I was at the helm and held course despite its clear intent to intersect us. We had right of way, and while I wasn’t going to insist if they indeed continued much longer on their path, I was going to hold it for a few moments more. Then he fell off to our stern, bluff called and answered. At that point we could see that it was an Italian coast guard ship, and as it tacked behind us, we realized it was probably checking our boat for any refugees who might be aboard.
It’s not unusual, we later learned, to see coast guard vessels from across the EU contributing to Greece’s efforts to deny entrance to migrants. Chilling, particularly when we saw an orange life vest floating into the Mytilini harbor a few days later. Our Digital Nomad visa, white faces and dollar bills got us a berth on one of Greece’s most beautiful islands, and we were among the fortunate ones allowed in because of it.
After another sunny, softly blowing day, we pulled into the Mytilini marina – and just like that, our first season was finally over.
