Zakinthos Town to Vathy

One of the dozens of ferries per day in Zakinthos Town

We handed Chloe off with to the taxi and then had a leisurely breakfast – particularly Jess who sat at the table for 2.5 hours while Marina and I went grocery shopping. We let go our stern lines and Jess pulled up the anchor – spawning my post about how all work stops when Tara lifts anchor.

Ross in his favourite Hat

Matt undoing the lines getting ready to go

We then set out for Vathy on Ithaki, a bay we have been to a number of times and is an excellent place to overnight. We stopped in a bay on the way in for a dip. An Italian guy cut us off because he absolutely needed to be there before us. Whatever, we dropped our hook, took a 10 minute swim and then gathered ourselves up and motored into Vathy.

The wind came up just as we were entering the harbour and began to blow a solid 20 knots. Terrific time to be anchoring. Our first throw had a guy on shore doing jumping jacks and whistling at us because he wanted to hold that spot for a superyacht to drop their anchor – it was only a 90 footer – hardly a superyacht. Being Canadians, we lifted our anchor instead of arguing about it and moved a hundred meters over. Our second throw put us a little too close to another boat. We were probably OK but after a half hour of deliberation we picked up the anchor again and moved 20 meters over so that we were centred between a couple of boats. We let out about 50 meters of chain and started to relax just as the wind decided to howl 25 knots or so for the next several hours. We were quite happy the be the outside boat in these conditions, while we had the deepest anchorage we also had the most chain out and if one of our neighbours broke loose from their holding and started to bash through the rest of the fleet.

Anyway, while it was howling on deck it was snug-as-a-bug-in-a-rug down below where we had dinner for the first time this year. We also had a chance to email Marcel and Lena who were going to meet us at Nidri the following day.

Up 2x during the night, Jess actually woke us up as the anchor alarm went off (note to self, when you have 50 meters of chain out set a longer than 30 meter anchor alarm). Regardless there was nothing wrong with our position and our trusty anchor held us tight for another night.