20th August - Trizonia, gulf of Corinth

It feels good to be on the move again at last. We hope to escape the high season crowds by heading south from Nidri, and indeed once past the island of Kastos, we left all but a few boats behind us, so we're in high spirits. There's hardly a sail to be seen. In a brisk westerly F4, we romped towards the Dragonera and Echinades islands, bound for Port Panteleimon on the mainland. We pick our way past the fish farms into a sheltered inlet to anchor. Although it’s a bit gusty, the whitecaps stop at the entrance.

We are the only boat in the anchorage at Port Panteleimon – that makes a change!
There’s a price to be paid for the seclusion though. The water’s too murky to swim in because of the fish farms nearby, and there’s a distinct whiff of fish in the air. We’re not complaining - it’s a beautiful and peaceful spot and we have it to ourselves. Come evening, the breeze drops and a flock of shaggy goats wander in single file along the shore, grazing on the dry scrub as they go.

We spend the next night anchored in the large shallow bay to leeward of Nisos Petalas in the Echinades islands. It’s a convenient stopping off place en route to the gulf of Patras which makes it a bit like a motorway services without the services. Our pilot mentions a cave in the cliffs here, so we go ashore to scramble the 300 feet or so up the rocks to explore inside. We’re sorry to disturb a roosting hawk that flies out of the cave as we reach it.
Once inside, we realise it’s huge and extends a long way in, but we haven’t brought a torch so can’t see much. Judging by the smell, it’s a popular sheltering place for the local goats. The view from the entrance out over the wetlands and mountains beyond is spectacular.


Rounding the south of Oxia island it feels good to turn east again for the first time since we arrived in Greece last year. A brisk breeze pushes us into the gulf of Patras towards Messalonghi. The harbour lies 2 miles up a dredged canal with salt flats on either side. At the entrance there’s a cluster of wooden houses on stilts that used to be fisherman’s huts and are now holiday homes.
The heads of swimmers bob about in the narrow channel and they appear unconcerned as we have to motor close by them. There’s a new marina in Missalonghi, but we opt to anchor outside in the large harbour with a handful of other boats.

Ashore we go in search of traces of Lord Byron. The famous romantic poet was helping the Greeks fight for independence from the Turks, but died of fever here in April 1824. We found out all about it during a visit to the town’s museum.
We reflect on the power of celebrity and good PR. Byron obviously attracted attention by dressing up in some outlandish outfits he’d had specially tailored in Albanian or Greek style.

Leighton is intrigued to find a collection of redundant military planes parked in a dusty corner. Missalonghi harbour is home to two loggerhead turtles and a dolphin, and which were a delight to see. Imagine our horror when on passage to Patras we passed a dead turtle in the water with what had killed it hanging out of its mouth – a plastic bag.
It’s one thing reading about what plastic bags do to marine wildlife, but to see what one did for this poor turtle really upset us.

The westerly wind had got up by the time we arrived in Patras, and our berth in the small marina gave no shelter from the swell. We rolled horribly all evening (we had to gimble the stove to cook supper) and all night. So it was a big relief to spend the next day ashore, when we took a trip to the Sanctuary at Olympia, the site of the first Olympic games. It was blisteringly hot but the many trees there gave welcome shade, allowing us to take our time to explore the whole site – a feast of ruined classical temples and secular buildings, as well as an athletics stadium that you could run races on today.
We cooled off later in the museum. The classical ruins of Olympia would definitely have appealed to Byron, and it’s surprising to think that excavations didn’t start here until fifty years after his death. Here are a few pictures to give you a flavour of the place.





Ferries come and go all day and night in Patra harbour, and we’re not used to the bright street lights and traffic noise of the city. Once we’ve stocked up on food and water, we’re happy to leave.

We tend to set off at midday at the earliest to make the best use of the afternoon sea breeze. Leaving Patra was no exception, but there was not a breath of wind the whole way. We motor under the spans of the Rio bridge, the longest cable stayed bridge in the world which marks the boundary between the gulf of Patras and the gulf of Corinth.
The bridge also lies on the site of the battle of Lepanto, the last sea battle fought with oared galleys, when Venice’s galleons powered by sails proved themselves clearly superior to the Turkish galleys.

We needn’t have worried that Trizonia wouldn’t come up to expectations. It’s an absolute gem. Popular with liveaboards and cruisers, the half finished marina occupies a natural harbour in a rural setting. We tie up alongside the concrete hammerhead of one of the pontoons. It’s good for swimming, walking, there’s no traffic, and while provisioning is limited, you can order fresh bread every day, and there are a couple of fish tavernas on the quay facing the mainland. What more could you possibly want?

11th August - Nidri, Lefkada

DOG ON THE LINE:

No, it was not a real dog! I did a double take too when I saw it hanging there. It was just a very realistic child’s stuffed toy that had got wet and was being dried on a clothesline.

WINDLASS UPDATE:
The parts finally arrived! Two weeks and two days from Australia. We had been told that the backlog from the trucker’s strike might mean it would be six weeks or more before we could even think about getting our parts. [I suppose sacrificing that goat to the ‘delivery gods’ must have really helped.]



Here is the problem. This is looking inside the windlass “gearbox” and you can see the worm gear has lost its middle teeth! This would not have been too bad except the teeth distributed themselves into to the cog of the main gear and one through the side of the gearbox case (This was where the oil was leaking from.).



We managed to put Humpty-Dumpy back together again but only after having to get a local engineer to cut the old gear off in a lathe(!). Reassembled and back in action, the anchor windlass is spookily as quiet as a sewing machine.





THE INTERIOR – EXPLORING LEFKADA ISLAND (BY SCOOTER)




Lefkada is technically an island, although it is connected to the Greek mainland by a swinging road bridge. The swinging bridge opens once an hour and there is always a mad rush as boats make their way through the canal before the bridge closes again.

Lefkada island is mountainous but the inland, away from the coast, conceals a surprising terrain of hills and fertile valleys.

Lefkada’s highest point is Mount Elati (1182m). As it is located roughly in the middle of the island creates as a natural barrier between north and south, as well as east and west parts of the island. The main roads tend to follow the coast “around” the mountains. To avoid the traffic, we choose to take the small roads “up and over” the mountains.


Some of the roads were little more than tracks. Others were reasonable but little used and had the roadside vegetation often growing out into the road.

As this is an earthquake zone you also have to keep your eyes open for the odd rock that may have rolled down the hill and onto the road…!



And of course, the goats! Luckily on a scooter you could usually ‘hear’ the goatherds and their clanking bells before rounding the bend. (Often you could smell them as well !) – If there were a shady spot they might all be standing under the tree in the middle of the road.



Feral goats were worst, as they had impressively sharp horns, no warning bells and were a bit unpredictable when grazing along side the road. I am pretty sure the scooter insurance did not cover goat attack! (PS – Before you email, No, I am not wearing a Bowie knife, that is the design on my swimming trunks.)



Then there might be the odd road block – where some poor lost person in a camper van is backing up a single lane road as there were few signs preventing them from taking the wrong road, and no place to turn around.

Once we reached the top of the mountains the views were spectacular! This is the view from Mnimati (1157m) – just below the highest point and the centre of the Island.



The trip back (3000 ft) down the mountain on switchback roads was pretty exciting. The scooter did not have a clutch and gears, rather it had some kind of weird and wonderful automatic transmission – while I am certain is great on a flat surface around town – was not really designed to go down vertical mountain roads. At least we had good brakes.



We trekked up dusty tracks to find ancient monasteries and stopped at Kerasias Springs, just outside of the village of Sivros.

Cold clear water has flowed out of the mountain here for centuries supplying the villages of Sivros and Vournikas with their only source of fresh water.



Twice we have hired scooters to explore the interior of Lefkada Island.
On our first trip was to the north part of the island inland where we went up Mount Stavrotas and visited the scenic mountain village of Karya. Where we joined the locals to have lunch in the main square under the shade of two huge plane trees. At Karya we also visited a unique embroidery folklore museum.



The Museum is the home of a local family (five generations!) of lace makers. The house is still lived in but part of the house has been preserved as a museum/memorial to one of Karya’s greatest lace makers who developed the technique for “blind stitch” embroidery – he design looks exactly the same on both sides of the cloth.



Our guide is the last surviving member of this family of lace makers. It was his grand mother who developed and taught the blind stitch technique to women in the village. The remarkable thing is that she only had one hand and in her later years was almost blind! Here Cathy is being shown the technique in the place where she used to do her work. (The old woman’s picture can be seen in the background.)





Not bad for Cathy’s first attempt! (Actually this is one he had prepared earlier.) The house (the museum) was a fascinating time capsule of Greek life over the last hundred years and showed how a whole family worked, ate, and slept all in the same room – complete with an inside well for water.



Everywhere you look you can see very old buildings that were destroyed in the 1953 earthquake. Quite often, rather than rebuilding the same site, the ruins were left standing and new buildings, sometimes the whole village, simply moved up the hill and started again.





Lefkada’s island history dates back to the Neolithic period (8000 BC).




One of Lefkada’s most famous residents was the German archaeologist, Wilhelm Dorpfeld, who spent much of his life trying to identify Lefkada as the home of Odysseus. Many of his excavations (like the bronze age one above) can be seen today. Dorpfeld was buried at his home overlooking one of our favourite anchorages - Tranquil Bay in Nidri.




We are moving on tomorrow – heading south toward Crete and exploring more of Greece as we go. We will remember our time spent in Lefkada – with friends and family, as one of the highlights of our journey so far.

8th August Vlicho Bay - Waiting....Waiting.....

First a loving tribute to my wife – On the 30th of June we celebrated being together for 15 years. It has to be the greatest test of any relationship to live together in a 40 foot floating box! We are now into our second year of living aboard Makarma and it would be untruthful to say that there are not the few “odd moments” (anchoring and docking?) when frustrations can bubble to the surface – but for the most part we have a very happy ship. I am a very lucky fellow to be sharing the adventure of a lifetime with such a lovely person.





WAITING ON PARTS, BEFORE WE HEAD SOUTH:

The picture below in NOT the inside of CERN’s Large Scale Hadron Collider… it is Makarma’s alternator in bits on my workbench. The idiot light that comes on when the alternator isn’t working had been glowing dimly for sometime. The alternator finally died but had the decency to do so after our visitors had departed.


We had a spare nineteen year old alternator onboard, but upon inspection I found its ceramic brush holder had fallen to bits and its carbon brushes were trashed. After several hours work, I managed to “make” two new brushes out of the old ones and had carefully super-glued the brush holder pieces back together; and reassembled the spare alternator – and did it work? YES! – for all of three minutes!


Luckily we knew of “George” the only alternator repair man in Nidri, so we packed both alternators into the dinghy and motored ashore to Nidri. George managed to fit us in to his busy schedule, parted us from 130 Euros, but was able to rebuild our main and spare alternator - so we are back in action.


THE ANCHOR WINDLASS:

We have a brilliant Maxwell electric anchor windlass on Makarma’s foredeck. It lowers and pulls up the anchor (plus several hundred pounds of chain!) every time we “sling the hook”.


The week before the family arrived, I was investigating oil leak from a small hole in the windlass gearbox. When we took the windlass apart, we discovered that the spiral worm gear (under the deck with the electric motor) had lost its middle “teeth” inside the gearbox and bits of metal had made a mess of the main gear. Cathy did a great job of cleaning out all the spare metal bits.

Maxwell windlasses were made in New Zealand. We discovered that Maxwell were no longer in business, but using the Internet we managed to locate all the parts we needed to repair the windlass – in Australia!

Two weeks ago, all the parts were dispatched “priority post” (six day delivery) from Australia.
One week ago, Greek truckers went on strike, so - no parcels are being delivered and “six day delivery” just became, “anyone’s guess.” No one knows anything and we are told, “We must just wait.”

If there is anything that causes my wife more stress than anchoring and a Force 8 gale – it has to be WAITING!


ANCHORED IN PARADISE:


We are not really marooned. We have a manual windlass – but we are pretty certain we will need someone with a ‘bench press’ to remove the old bearings (George the alternator man!) So we are hanging around for the parts to arrive and when they do, we will tie up on a pontoon in Nidri, near to George’s workshop, but also so we don’t need to use the anchor while we are repairing the windlass. That’s the plan.

There could be worst places to be stuck waiting! Most people would relish the thought of two weeks enforced idleness here. At the moment we are anchored in the shelter of Vlicho Bay about a mile from Nidri. A lovely swimming pool is just a short dinghy ride ashore and a quarter mile walk up a track through an olive grove. We have spent last week doing jobs on the boat, reading, writing, and exploring inland. Cathy bought a couple of small deck chairs that have greatly added to comfort on deck.


LEFKADA TOWN

We found that we could catch the local bus from Vlicho Bay the twelve kilometers up to Lefkada town for 1.50 Euros each way. Lefkada town is a manic place full of traffic (Cars, scooters, bicycles, buses!) and tourists.


We almost never eat junk food – but we have to make an exception for a lunchtime “Chicken Pita Gyro” at Dalton’s Grill House! You don’t want to know what all is in it – but with a cold beer, it's delicious! If the family run Dalton’s ever went international – McDonalds empire would be destroyed overnight.


ANYONE FOR SEA FOOD?

At the other end of town the local fishmonger has just taken deliver of a swordfish – it was too large to fit on his cutting table – so what does he do? He chops it up on the sidewalk! I am sure there would have been trouble if the Greek Food Health Inspector had seen him smoking that cigarette while he was cutting it up! Yuk!



NEXT INSTALMENT…
TIME TO GET OUT OF TOWN AND INTO THE COUNTRY

Lefkada town is…well, a town. Lots of shops, people, and bustle but we prefer the countryside. So we take to the hills on our hired motor scooter to explore the interior of the island – where the locals really know how to deal with cruelty to animals much better than in the city!