On the Move to Athens

A "Superyacht" doing a flyby

Finally getting on our way to Athens we left Tranquil bay for points East – destination unknown as we were not sure what we were getting into weather wise and reality is that there aren’t all that many places on the mainland coast that accept yachts of our size. If you have a Super Yacht – 45 meters or longer, no problem – you anchor out securely and take your 15 meter matching powerboat into town, but for us with a mid-sized yacht, you need to find a place that is both safe at anchor and close enough to where you need to be.

We powered out of Tranquil Bay and headed out of the Stenon Meganisiou – basically the Meganisi Straight, and we found wind. Lots of it. 25 knots close reach we had a half a jib out and were averaging eight knots in lumpy seas. For those of you that don’t think 8 knots is all that fast – it’s a fairly brisk run of about 15 km/hour … think of it as driving a Motorhome at 90 miles an hour on the road to Whistler. Things are flying around in the cabin, you come down below and find kitchen knives on the floor, the coffee pot in the sink and anything not tied down is now somewhere else.

A good portion of the journey was sheltered from the waves, though as we went between Lefkas and Ithaki there was precious little between us and Italy and you can certainly tell when the 1-2 meter wave surface wave pattern (waves close together) hits the underlying 2-3 meter long swell from Italy (waves 50 meters between crests). This made for some lively up and down sailing.

Ross continues to wear his IPad while trimming the jib

After a couple of hours of this we decided to go to a place we had anchored before. Approaching Ithaki the wind completely shut off, and we anchored in this secluded bay with only 3 super-yachts in it. We had anchored here before, it’s a bit of a dodgy place, very deep in the middle so you need to get close to the shore. Most people take a long-line ashore but we chose just to anchor as we’re short-handed. Both Ross and I were tired and kind of bored, so I suggested after a couple of conference calls that I would turn on the trusty Honda generator and we’d watch a movie. We watched Will Farrell in “Stranger than Fiction” – not at all his normal stuff (thankfully because I nearly switched it off when I saw he was starring in it). During the movie the wind came up from 5 to 10 to 15 knots. After a final check I went to bed leaving Ross on his computer and watching over things.