Syros to Mykonos

More upwind, more wind – geez it’s windy here in Greece. A charter captain we talked to said he would only buy a former charter boat from Croatia and not Greece since the Greek boats get beat up in the wind. After a few weeks of it we can see what he means. We proceeded upwind (again) to Mykonos after shopping for the lumber, clothes, books etc. in Syros. Mykonos is a beautiful Greek city that had an infamously bad harbour – so they built a new marina a couple miles out of town. Unfortunately it’s kind of like the Mirabel Airport in Montreal – so far out of the city it’s not really worth going to.

The marina has laid moorings but no management so the majority of the mooring lines have been lost and you have to med-moor à but there is a lot of danger putting your anchor down amongst am mass of thick chains and anchors that are meant for moorings. Every day someone snags an anchor and needs to call in a diver to help release it at 100 Euros or so fee and the cost of a lot of time and angst. We were very careful and decided to go “hammerhead”. That’s when you tie up at the end of a dock side on with an anchor out. A bit nerve-wracking but once you’ve done it you realize that it is safe it’s a great alternative.

We met our friends from Victoria again, plus new friends on a cruise. There were Germans, Canadians, and Brits on the boat – all single, none knew each other. They were on a 10 day ‘get oriented to sailing’ trip. The skipper Cornelius was a really generous guy with information and skills and the rest of the passengers were both interesting and a lot of fun. We were able to bounce our itinerary off of Cornelius – unfortunately it looks like Santorini is a pass for us with the boat. The only marina on Santorini capable of handling our boat has an entrance depth of 1.6 meters, and our boat is 2.3 meters deep – and that’s a lot of sand to plow out of the way with the keel. There are some moorings out front but they belong to tour operators and cannot be used by private yachts. We looked into ferrying there but the fast ferry is expensive and the slow ferry is – slow and an overnight. If we could get to Ios it would be OK but the problem with Ios is that the ferry wash (of all the ferries to Santorini) create  the same problems as Syros where we broke the boarding ladder … so we will wait until the next trip to go to Santorini.