Saturday 10th October – Spilia Bay, Meganisi A Taste of the Ionian inland sea: Vonitsa – Levkada – Nidri – Meganisi

Before leaving Vonitsa, we hire a car with our delightful Dutch neighbours, Frank and Anneke and drive right around the gulf of Amvrakia. First stop on the tour is Nikopolis, the city Octavian built to celebrate his victory over Anthony and Cleopatra. What an amazing place – and we have it more or less to ourselves. The ruins that remain are far too big to explore in a day, and it’s only one fifth of the original city. There are some very fine floor mosaics in the old Byzantine church; massive ramparts in the city walls; and an almost completely intact round theatre. A number of stones carved with inscriptions and part of a fluted column have been left in the ditch alongside a ploughed field – clearly unearthed by the farmer’s plough and not considered worth collecting.

Next we stop in Arta to look at the old packhorse bridge, its arches spanning high over the river. It’s said that the builder, fed up that its foundations kept being washed away, took the advice of a talking bird and buried his wife alive in the central pier. She now haunts the bridge! Driving a car could be like building a bridge, jokes Frank, when Cathy criticises Leighton’s driving. After a picnic on the shore of the gulf at Menidi, we check out some good anchorages on the southern shore of the gulf – a good place to escape the flotilla crowds next summer maybe.

We leave Vonitsa with regret, amid warm farewells from our new friends. It’s an autumnal misty morning, with a slight breeze. We motor past Preveza and out of the channel into the open Ionian. There’s a rolling swell and still no wind. An hour’s motoring later and we’re approaching the northern entrance to the Levkas canal. We anchor for lunch in the channel under the lee of a sandbank and wait for the swing bridge to open at 2pm. The bridge opens on the hour every two hours and is actually a floating barge which swings around to allow boats through. From there it’s less than half a mile to Levkada harbour, home to hundreds of sailing boats.

The pilots say you’re not allowed to anchor in the harbour, but we join a handful of other cruising boats at anchor, including ‘Shindig’ belonging to PBO’s Andrew Simpson. The holding is good solid mud, which with a strong southerly forecast is a comfort. Unusually for a landlocked harbour, Levkada is exposed in southerlies so we tuck ourselves well into the lee of the marina and hope for the best. We get wind and rain for the best part of two days – one night we stand anchor watch for a while during a particularly vicious thunderstorm. When we come to raise the anchor later, there’s mud up to its rollbar.

Between the downpours we enjoy exploring the little shops and alleyways of Levkada. It’s a pretty town overlooking a salt lagoon, and although the town had to be completely rebuilt after the 1953 earthquake, it has plenty of charm and some good shops.

Once the weather settles down again, we go south through the canal to enter the inland sea where a brisk northwesterly barrels us along under full sail. When the old girl picks up her skirts in the puffs to put on a good turn of speed, we understand why so many people come back here to sail year after year. It’s flat calm, it’s bikini hot, and it’s October for heaven’s sake! Steep jagged mountains rise on either side of us, and several wooded islands with secluded inlets lie ahead of us. It is absolute heaven – the most fun we’ve had sailing all year. We decide to base ourselves in the centre of things in Nidri and anchor a short dinghy ride away from the town in lovely Tranquil Bay.

We take a couple of days in Nidri to recce the place in advance of Honor and Stewart’s visit, then we have another stunning sail to Port Athene on Meganisi. Leighton is on the helm and enjoys being sail-trimmer for the afternoon. Pictures of Meganisi rightly appear in all the sailing magazines and pilot books. The island’s deeply indented coastline is perfect for overnight anchorages in beautiful surroundings with short distances between each one. You can’t get close to describing it adequately without running out of superlatives. Suffice it to say the water’s deep and clear, and ashore it’s remarkably unspoiled – just the occasional taverna at the head of a bay. This late in the season, there’s still a lot of boats about, especially flotillas, but it isn’t exactly crowded.

On Meganisi we enjoy one last gasp of glorious summer weather. We’re making the most of six days in succession of cloudless skies and 30 degree heat by swimming every day, knowing it won’t be long before the weather breaks again.

Before returning to Nidri again to await Honor and Stewart’s arrival next weekend, we spend a couple of days in the idyllic surroundings of Spilia Bay, also on Meganisi. We’re berthed on the quay beside the Taverna Spilia, with a view behind us of Skorpios, the Onassis family’s private island. Perched above us is Spartachori, one of the prettiest towns in the Ionian with stupendous views of the inland sea.

Spilia bay is a perfect place to reflect on how far we’ve come this season. We’ve sailed just under 2,000 miles since we left Ayamonte on 11^th May, but it seems like a million miles away. The experiences we’ve had on the way here have enriched us and deepened our appreciation of what we (and the boat) are capable of. We can wind down now for the winter in the knowledge that we haven’t made too many idiotic mistakes; the boat’s still in one piece; and we’ll be back next year to explore this lovely cruising area some more.

26th September – Vonitsa in the Gulf of Amvrakia

High Point: Vonitsa town quay is home to an assortment of cruising folk of different nationalities. Once here, most boats seem to stay quite a while. Our neighbours are Frank and Anneke, a Dutch couple aboard Panteleimon, a Victory 40. They tell us stories of their voyages which are uncannily similar to our own – fire in engine; running aground, and so on…Maybe they’re common to everyone. And we have exactly the same anchors, instruments, etc; and the same outlook too. They’ve just returned from a cruise along the coast of Albania. There’s a German couple on a home-built catamaran who are spending the winter here, and several English, including Derek and Lynne from Essex (who’ve spent 6 summers in the Ionian and have no desire to sail anywhere else); and a slightly manic looking couple who’ve brought 5 chihuahuas onboard with them.

It’s a ready-made community in which we swap boat bits; borrow each other’s manuals and pilots; share what we know about places to visit and how to fix things. I can’t see us leaving in a hurry.

Low Point: It’s blowing hard from the southeast today, bringing low scudding clouds and frequent showers. The usual view across the gulf is shrouded in mist, and the sea is flecked in white. Our kedge line is taut under the strain of holding the stern beam-on to the wind. Yesterday afternoon we had another thunderstorm with strong gusts and heavy rain. We’re glad to be tied bows-to to the quay, snug in the lee of the Venetian fort whose walls tower above us on the hill. We’ve got the duvet back out, and Gordon the ship’s mascot has his dungarees and sou’wester back on. Autumn is here – now our thoughts are turning to the winter jobs and where we’ll cruise next year.

Vonitsa lies inland on the shore of the Amvrakia gulf, some 8 miles from Preveza. The gulf is a 150 square mile inland sea which – unlike the Med - is rich in marine life, and is a fantastic sheltered cruising area. With the strong southerlies on the way, we decide it’ll be a much better billet than Preveza.

We spend our first night here anchored to the east of a small island which is linked to the land by a causeway. There’s no room on the quay as the Sailing Holidays flotilla is in town. We go for a walk through the pine woods growing on the island and come across a tiny white painted chapel dedicated to a stern looking fellow by the name of St Nektarios. The open door lets the sunlight fall on icons that depict more unfamiliar Orthodox saints, each one with a hand raised in the same gesture of benediction.

Vonitsa’s most prominent landmark is the Venetian fort on the hill above the town. Once we’re moored on the quay, we climb up to the battlements to be rewarded with some amazing views of the gulf - a scattering of islands and plenty of green wooded inlets to anchor in, with mountains in the distance. We spot a tortoise in the undergrowth munching its way through a rotting prickly pear. Later we go for a swim off the pebbly beach. The water’s still pleasantly warm, although the shower on the beach afterwards is bracingly cold. We keep a watchful eye open for ‘Myrtle’ the resident loggerhead turtle, which Leighton’s convinced would give you a nasty nip given the chance. We saw it earlier in the harbour and it’s an awesome size.

Vonitsa town has an authentic feel to it – it’s the first town we’ve visited that isn’t a resort catering to foreign tourists. Here elderly men with leathery faces sip black coffee over a game of backgammon in pavement cafes. We notice one man is missing his right hand – the disastrous consequence of the now outlawed practice of dynamiting for fish. We count seven different varieties of goat bells in the hardware shop. Cats press against the doorway of the fishmonger’s, waiting for scraps. The town’s only traffic lights don’t work and holes in the pavements trip you up if you don’t watch where you’re walking. Most of the shopkeepers speak little or no English, so we have to make our few words of Greek go further with smiles and gestures. It motivates us to keep going with learning the language.