It’s a Small World

It’s a full time job, keeping Avril out of the Supermarkets while we’re in Harbor. She loves to shop, that one. We spent an hour or two tidying the boat, restocking provisions and bringing in the last of the laundry. It’s time to leave beautiful Samos and head South again. After our very unsuccessful stab at the Arki Beach a day or so ago, we decided to give it another whirl. After all, it’s supposed to be so beautiful.

We sailed out of harbor in high spirits, ready to tackle what the sea threw at us. The waves were much calmer, and since we’re now going with them, there was none of that annoying crashing. We felt quite superior as we watched a catamaran slamming upwind. Arki was reached shortly after noon, and this time we knew what to do. Send Rob and Zach C out in the dinghy to attach a line to a large rock on the shore, and then bring it out to us. Meanwhile we set our anchor, and were all ready to receive the line when they got back. So it took a few tries, but there was zero stress. The water is so clear I could see the anchor falling almost till the bottom. It was amazing! Little tropical fish swam around, the wind blew (of course, it always seems to here), and the scrub and rock hillsides looked bright in the sun. A sandwich lunch was laid out on deck, and we munched away while waiting to see if our hold was good. It wasn’t quite, so we secured a second line to shore and got a much better angle. There’s something about Rob and Zach C squirting around in that dinghy that always makes me laugh. Forrest says it’s because Rob always looks vaguely guilty when he’s really innocent, and Zach looks innocent when he’s really guilty. Whatever it is, they are a fun sight to behold.

It was deemed prudent to keep an anchor watch, so the Skipper and Co Skipper stayed on the boat while the rest headed to Tiganakia Beach, the dinghy overloaded with people, snorkeling gear and dry bags with other beach paraphernalia. It sat so low, the bums wanted to dip in the water. Meanwhile, the boat watchers route planned, cleaned up the boat and in general watched the anchor. Its a bit challenging trying to plan a route when you’re on a new sea and are pretty new sailors with a pretty new boat. The only thing you can do is test and see how it all works. We really wanted to cross to Astypalea, but it was showing a 1.4m significant waves. We would be going down wind and running almost directly with the waves, but how doable was that really? It’s a 55 mile run from Arki to Astypalea, but there is an island directly half way between that we could shelter at if we needed.

Eventually, we deemed the boat safe and joined the rest on the beach. It was a little chilly, but a lot of fun to poke around among the rocks, look for little fish and in general just chill. There was a deserted looking compound by the beach, with a silver Airstream camper accompanied by a Turkish man who was weeding around the trees. His English wasn’t, so we couldn’t get his story unfortunately.

Back at the boat, nobody seemed to be able to stop swimming, so it took a bit to get under way. Avril and I tried to get supper cooked before the waves hit, but didn’t quite get there. It was, well, maddening. It’s maddening and scary to cook in a rocking boat. For sure this boat, because the galley runs along one side of the cabin and there’s absolutely nowhere to brace yourself. The stove is on gimbles, which allows it to rock and “self level”, but when you have one pot of bubbling spaghetti sauce and another one of boiling pasta water, you simply don’t trust it. And we couldn’t, cause the waves were a bit messy, so they did very unexpected things. Eventually we got a system going where one hung onto the kettles and the other did the stirring or salting or stuffing chocolate into the other ones mouth (anti-depressant, you know) or clipped back each others fly away hair. You can say we are bonding for sure! When all was said and done, we handed up bowls of fat noodles with sausage and sauce, topped with freshly grated parmesan cheese and a garlic toast. It was actually delicious and almost caused us to forget the cup of tea that sailed across the counter and splashed everywhere!

We got our sails up and proceeded to head out into the unknown. It’s quite a feeling, and my heart wanted to quiver a little. This is a very solid boat, so I wasn’t worried about that part. Just worried about being so very vulnerable. If all went well we should get to Astypalea around 3am, so it wouldn’t be all night. The crew divided into 2hr shifts, and those who weren’t on duty went to bed. Avril and I had the first two hours since we didn’t want to deal with the absolute worst wind and waves.

Trick on us, we did have the worst. It was so amazing and wonderful and sometimes nerve wracking. The stars were gorgeous and the dark mountains of waves looked like they seriously wanted to overwhelm us. It was also a busy ship channel, so avoiding boats was something to take seriously. It was a little hard judging where they were in relation to us because you couldn’t steady watch them. They kept disappearing behind the waves, appearing again for a moment and disappearing again. There was one I was watching pretty closely, and hence didn’t notice another big one sneaking up on the other side. When I did, it was quite large! And quite threatening! I could see we would miss it, but that was way too close. You could see the hull and smell the diesel smoke. To justify myself, I will also say that the wind had picked up and things with the boat were also really squirrely at that time. Plus Avril was sharing her love story, so really there was a lot going on! I actually decided to wake Heath up 25 minutes before shift change cause I was having sensory overload. He didn’t seem too miffed. That’s what the captain is for, after all.

Rob and Heath did their 2 hours, and Zach and Forrest got us into our port. It was an extremely protected spot and from my little berth I could hear that the guys executed a perfect docking. I won’t comment on how the headsail was furled….

And then we slept.