Saronic Islands and Peloponnes (1. bis 11. Sep. 2009)

[ Saronische Inseln und Peloponnes von 1. bis 11. September. Da die Törns mit Crews aus den unterschiedlichen Nationen stattfinden, will ich diese Multikulturelle Dimension auch auf den Berichten wiedergeben. So erscheint das Logbuch auf English. The tonge of the Crew ... ]

On September 1st our legend begins. Sailing south the coast of Peloponnes ...

We met our Skipper Theo, at Kalamaki Marina near Piraeus. A word of warning here – we were advised by our Tour Operator to get the bus from Athens Airport, despite usually not wishing to be anywhere near people of a lower social order than ourselves. Obviously. However, at €3 each as opposed to two taxis at €40 each, it was a no-brainer.

The bus driver could not have been less helpful, announcing our stop despite it being about two miles from the marina. Off we got – stupid tourists – encumbered with our luggage, on a sweltering day. Turns out there’s a stop right outside the Marina. Perhaps he’d heard me talking loudly about the availability, these days, of deodorants to ordinary folk.

So it came as a relief to meet Theo after a long, hot walk.

We chartered a Bavaria 50’, featuring six cabins. Bavarias are what you might call ‘bog standard’ charter yachts, so if you go for one of these don’t expect others to be impressed. The accommodation was basic but reasonably comfortable – sort of caravanning afloat.

The crew were:

Me – entrepreneur, genius and international man of mystery. The Jubbler – my missus, thoracically enhanced uber-babe. Georgie – 22 year-old daughter, trainee movie star arm-candy and I am told, a ‘looker’. Will – 21 year-old son, ambition: to be as cool as possible without actually having the inconvenience of a career. Elliot – Georgie’s long-term boyfriend, computer geek (deep geek, I kid you not), black-belt karate champion but about as macho as Graham Norton.

Rather than bore the reader with a straight chronography of the voyage ( “…on the Tuesday we all bought a flagon of Metaxa, on Wednesday we all went to the doctor’s with alcohol poisoning,” etc., etc., ...) I thought I’d pick out some highlights.

First, the skipper. As we were all to be within the same space for a reasonable period of time, it’s obviously important we all get along. Well, that rules the family out. Theo, on the other hand, was not what I was expecting – a former Oceanographer, Doctor of Physics, linguist, polymath, musician (it later turned out), sailor, diver - a real renaissance man. All of which of course annoyed me intensely.

He hid his immense brain behind a thick accent, though his English was more than good enough. Curiously, because international science is written in English (quite right too), he knew words like ‘interoperability’, ‘incandescence’ and ‘xenophobe’ (actually I introduced him to that one), but struggled with slippery commonplaces such as ‘Tuesday’, or ‘Thursday’. In fact, ‘Saturday’, ‘Sunday’, ‘Monday’ and ‘Wednesday’ were equally mysterious.

In fairness, Theo speaks fluent German (his partner and daughter live in Hamburg), Russian, Finnish, Latvian, Spanish, Creole, Norwegian and Bantu. And Greek. We found this out during one particularly chaotic Greek ceremony – the Festival of Anchors.

So to highlight two. We sailed from Piraeus, via an overnight stop in a bay, to Poros (Greek for ‘narrow’). Then off to the Peleponnese coast, sailing south.

The end of the line was Hydra, on the way back. What a beautiful place – like Monaco without quite so many t*ssers. It’s also tiny – a harbour the size of a football pitch was temporary home to around 600 yachts, all of which (as there is nothing so sensible as a ‘mooring’ in Greece) had thrown their anchors into the middle, backed up to the nearest boat, then tied on. This meant (a) the yachts were tied seven deep – so you have to apologetically walk over everyone’s boat to get to/from the jetty. This is fine when sober, as I was to discover later, when saying ‘sorry’ to someone’s mast. And (b), the following morning the inevitable happened: several hundred people, on several hundred yachts, speaking several hundred languages, all tried to leave at once. The International Festival of Anchors had begun.

The first anchor came up fine – albeit carrying fourteen others. By the time this had been sorted out, everyone else had tried to lift their anchors, too. It looked like Edward Scissorhands trying out foundry work.

Our boat, ‘Atlas V’, contributed magnificently to the Festival, mostly owing to the worn-out sprockets on our anchor puller-upper thingy. As anchor-pulling-up was my job (which involved nothing more strenuous than pushing the right button on a remote control), this became a bit embarrassing: up she’d come, without someone else’s anchor, get to the end of the boat, then crash! The chain would fall of the sprockets and down she went, chain snaking at a frightful pace behind it. I’d jam someone’s fingers in the mechanism to make it stop (the noise daughters make can be quite distracting), pull it up again, this time with seven other anchors. Untangle the anchors, get it to the end of the boat – crash! Off she goes again. It took us more than two hours from the decision to leave to leave.

Monemvasia

Highlight three: we greatly enjoyed Monemvasia. This is a rock on the coast of the Peleponnese, connected to the mainland via a causeway. Due to it’s commanding strategic position, it has been fought over for centuries by various nations (it says here), though Iceland has yet to stake a claim. The rock has a fortified town carved into it, completely enclosed by castellated walls.

We walked over the causeway from the marina, and entered a medieval town; cobbles, narrow streets (only wide enough for three or four people at a time) and some charming tavernas and gift shops. Now, the word ‘gift shop’ will usually be enough for me to run to the nearest bar and refuse to move until the awful sickness has gone. In this case they were actually – am I saying this? – quite tasteful, and the owners & staff were welcoming without selling hard.

Aspects of the medieval town

Some more Impressions of Monemvasia

We found a taverna, and as it was our wedding anniversary, got Elliot to pay for a meal for all of us. Afterwards, we decamped to a bar and discovered the skill, poise and balance required for traditional Greek dancing was entirely absent from this fat English bloke, especially with two bottles of Greek red on board. (Note: I love red wine, particularly Rioja – I went through a fair number of Greek reds, from about €6 to €20, and they were all exceptionally good. Really, surprisingly good.)

Some more Landscapes

Towards Hydra

Leonidi

Two final comments. Theo asked us at the beginning of the trip what sort of holiday we wanted: as we had youngsters (well, early 20’s) with us, we wanted some nightlife; equally, Jubbler and I wanted some P&Q and sunbathing. Theo suggested the perfect compromise, so we alternated nights – one moored in a harbour, the next in a bay where we’d cook for ourselves and eat in the moonlight. Magical.

The youngsters loved the combination, as did we. They dubbed Theo a ‘legend’, a soubriquet which morphed inevitably into ‘Captain Ledge’.

Finally, on the journey home, we encountered dolphins, which did the dolphiny things dolphins do: leaping out of the water, playing with our bow wave, beautifully and effortlessly speeding around us, and answering questions on the equations involved in hydrodynamics (turns out they are really quite intelligent after all).

More Dolphins [click on]

Immediately before the departure

[ Logbook from Paul / Kurzfassung des Logbuchs von Paul ]