Off to Elafanisos

A panorama of behind the anchorage at Elafanisos

Elafanisos is a small island on the bottom of the eastern-most finger of the Peloponnese and is ringed by this unbelievable sand beach. The water shallows slowly and you anchor in about 4 meters of water and here's how we got there. 

The water is so clear that the dinghy seems to
hover in mid air behind the boat

Marina and I got up fairly early ... like 06:45, and started things moving with a parade to the holding-tank head. Then while I pre-flighted the motor Jess and Marina did a little skinny-dipping off the back of the boat. Chloe came up a few minutes later, probably woken up by the kettle's whistle and she had a dip too.

We readied the boat and away we went powering out of Gramvousa and once outside encountered some pretty big swell. There was a little bit of wind -- like 5 knots, so we motor-sailed in the low-8's which is a good thing because we had about 60 miles to go. We carried the jib the whole way making great time. I managed to grab a few winks on the bow cushions until my son came and told me to get the heck out of the sun, so I moved to my room and sawed a few logs for a couple more hours waking up when the engine rpms dropped because we were at Elafanisos. 

We dropped 30 meters of chain in 4 meters of beautiful white sand. We all hopped in the water and swam to shore. The beach at Elafanisos must be in the top 5 of Greece and maybe the top 50 in the world. After fun on the beach we swam back to the boat and had a shower, cocktail and prepared for dinner.

Some of us got a little more sun than we had hoped and others may have gamed a bit more than is appropriate but Ross soon led us in a game of keep away and he had a nice long swim with Chloe around the anchor. We settled down for a nice dinner on board and were expecting a bit of a rock and rolly night - but hey, you never know because the wind was abating.

Well, the wind didn’t quit and the boat was oscillating through about 40 degrees of motion – whoomph, whoomph, back and forth, rolling you around like crazy. It doesn’t seem to affect the kids or Marina but I end up getting up every hour or two when a big set of waves comes in to take a look outside to make sure everything is OK.

In the morning I resolved that we weren't spending another night there so we planned to go to Porto Kayio in the afternoon. Ross was pissed because he loves it at Elafanisos . We roused him out of bed, to the beach and did a little bit of SUP surfing and played keep-away with the ball. I walked to the cantina with Jessie and Chloe and had a Freddochino (did they steal the name from Starbucks or the other way around) and back to the beach where Marina and Ross were still SUP surfing. We swam back to the boat and got going to Porto Kayio, the wind was favourable so we pulled out the sails and had an awesome few hours fully powered up on a close-hauled course.