More on Kos

We spent three days in Kos, a very nice touristy city on the island of (guess…) Kos. The island resembles a fish and the city is in the mouth of the fish. We needed a place with good shelter from the south as we had a couple of days of 30 knot winds forecast. Most of us cruising types want the boat to be securely tied up and to be sitting in our living rooms by the fire when it’s blowing 30 knots. It’s noisy, rolly and you are worried about all sorts of bad things that can happen (anchor dragging, stern lines snapping, shifting sideways into the boat beside you, yanking out the cleats from the deck, Bimini blowing apart, getting hit by lightning, etc).

So we got into Kos early, put about 60 meters of chain out the front in 4 meters of water, literally sewed the boat to the quay with two stern lines each side, and a mid and bow line on the side with the prevailing wind. The only thing we didn’t do is put out a second anchor. A big German boat beside us did so and maybe next time we will for the peace of mind. Come to think of it we will probably just go to a marina with laid moorings (2 ton concrete blocks with 1” chain and thick ropes) and not care about how hard it blows.

We arrived in Kos on Sunday and stayed until Tuesday morning. Kos as we have described before is a lovely tourist town and had some cool provisions (Mount Gay Rum) games like Rummikub, exotic Halloween outfits for the girls, and places to get some birthday stuff for Jessie. Even Ross wanted to get a new shirt – perhaps four months with two t-shirts is even too much for him.

The most interesting thing for us at Kos was the number of feral cats. Hundreds of them were near the castle that we were moored at. Young, old (I think it might be more the mileage than the age), all colours, all different types of temperaments. Jessie took her allowance, walked into town and bought cat food and fed a number of the feral cats. She looked a bit like the Pied Piper in some of the pictures we took with 20 of 30 cats around her scrounging for food.