Ionian Islands (continued) - Ithaca and Kefalonia

1st July. Kioni, Ithaca
A new month , a new island. Ithaca is supposedly the home of Odysseus, although there does seem to be remarkably little archaeological proof. He would have had a palace here several thousand years ago, so its not entirely unlikely that it was swallowed up by the numerous earthquakes that ravage this part of the Med. Even the supposed site of the 'Cave of the Nymphs' was thought to be accidentally destroyed by quarrying – how careless! Of course, the Iliad and Odyssey have to be read whilst in these parts, though I think some sort of award should be forthcoming for anyone who finishes the Iliad!
Kioni was a sweet little place with clear turquoise water in the port. We had just got our anchor to grip, and were trying to tie a line ashore to some rocks, when a charter yacht with 4 men-in-a-boat,  retired Sheffield lads,  tried to suck our line into their prop in their hurry to get anchored and tied up, resulting in a lot of shouting and tangles. They did treat us to G&T's on board to make up for it, and they promised to warn us next year when they come on holiday again.

3rd July Vathi, capital of Ithaca
We anchored in the harbour of Vathi, it has mud that sucks your anchor in and doesn't let go. Thank goodness, because the wind really knows how to blow here. Most evenings it blows F5-6 due to thermal and geographic katabatic effects of the surrounding mountains, and that's when there's no background wind. When there's wind around the rest of the Ionian it really howls here. This makes for an interesting time as the charter boats have to leave the normally serene anchorages that have become untenable and there's a lot of unhappy people looking seasick at anchor, too scared to get in dinghies and go ashore, or constantly relaying their anchors to avoiding dragging onto the quay walls. When it blows like this, the best trick is to anchor off, and if you want to go ashore, go in your swimwear, with your evening clothes in a drybag!
Vathi claimed to be having a cultural weekend, and so in the good company of Bob and Liz on Birvidik, we set about enjoying the activities on offer. Friday night, music on the quay – we never heard any ! Saturday night, cultural discussion about Homer, advertised in Greek and English. This should be interesting, we thought. We tried to find out more at the tourist information but no English was spoken there. So we all went along to the cultural centre at the appointed hour to find the talks were all in Greek. So we went and ate and drank ourselves silly instead.
Sunday -small church procession and Greek dancing on the quay. We went along 30 minutes before the advertised start time of 10pm, which was good, as the dancing finished at 10pm. More drinking and eating to compensate for our disappointment. Still it is a lovely little town, very Greek and not too touristy, but oh boy does it blow!
There are some lovely swimming bays around Vathi, so we made it our base for some time, popping out for the day and coming back to the safe anchorage. One evening we came back in 42 knots of wind, and the gusts were picking up buckets of surface water and flinging it at us.
For a few days a loggerhead turtle kept the boats company in the bay. I thought since they were endangered that they would be quite cute, but he was an ugly brute, with a head the size of human head, teeth, and a barnacle covered 1m round shell. I shudder to think about ever meeting one when swimming – I'll jump as high as the mast .......

Mirabella V to the right of the harbour

We had an interesting neighbour for a couple of nights when Mirabella V visited the port. This is the largest single-masted sailing yacht in the world, and of unfortunate notoriety for being grounded on rocks within a few days of its maiden voyage. Despite it's prodigious size, it is perfectly proportioned, so doesn't appear so big, until you see one of the crew walking past the furling drums, and he's about half the height! It is 75m long, 14.8m wide (2m wider than we are long!), 85m mast height, 10m keel. The boat is available for charter for $375,000 per week (that 1 week would keep us at sea for at least 20 years!). In the 'garage' it has 3 ribs (400hp, 240hp, 125hp) 4 laser dinghies, 2 seedoos, 3 replica models, diving gear, kayaks, and on deck a 20 person jacuzzi and dip pool. But even so, they were in the same anchorage as us, swimming in the same sea!

14th July, Sami, Kefalonia. 

Another new island. I visited Kefalonia 20 years ago so was interested to see how tourism had developed on the island, particularly post Captain Corelli's Mandolin fame. Despite the site of much of the filming, Sami is remarkably unaffected, apart from every other bar and restaurant having a Corelli theme or photos of Nicholas Cage and Penelope Cruz ! It still remains a laid back Greek town, without any high rise tourist apartments, and not too many tourist tat shops. The small quay was free and even the water supply was free, so this was a good base from which to explore Kefalonia (and do laundry!) 

We took a hot walk up to the ancient site of Same, a 3rd century BC fort on the hilltop overlooking the Strait between Kefalonia and Ithaca. Incredibly one of the cyclopean walls is still standing despite the earthquake that levelled the whole of the island in 1953, and numerous ones before that. They sure knew how to build in those days. How much has mankind forgotten!

Now the site is only home to a lot of funnel-web spiders. 

Stu rearranges some pots 

The Cyclopean wall – the ancients thought that only a Cyclops (a giant) could bring these blocks to the hills to build a wall like this

A funnel-web spider in his home

Steve and Sophie from Poole Yacht club were on holiday nearby, so we spent a pleasant couple of days with them. As thanks for taking them on a sailing trip they gave us a tour in their hire car, with a special stop at LIDL, where their eyes popped out of their heads when we filled the tiny boot with another 6 weeks supply of beer! 

Mourtos beach -the colour of the water is due to the local limestone, not digitally enhanced

The last time I was here, there was no road to the beach. 

Our next visitor was Janet from Sheffield, taking a break from the radiography-rat-race. 

Janet must have inadvertently packed some Sheffield weather, as we had rain for the first time in 60 days! When not dodging rain and wind in Vathi, we spent the week touring swimming spots around the islands of Kefalonia and Ithaca, our favourite one Ormos Ay Andreou, which we renamed Goaty Bay. A large herd of wild goats populate the cove, sheltering from the sun and tourists in their caves during the day. A dusk they trundle along to the small beach and their favourite bathing spot and stand in the water cooling off, and probably getting rid of the insects in their coats. At night they sleep on the beach, while some others appear to keep watch at the edges of their 'camp'.  It was better than Eastenders, honest. 

Ormos Ay Andreou- Goaty bay

We briefly popped into the well known Fiskardo, but it was stuffed full of charterers. As one boat left it's slot another would zip into its place risking all out anchor-rage. We turned tail and fled, renaming it Fiascardo! 

After taking Janet, our last booked visitor, back to the airport we had to face our decision – to stay in the Ionian, to go around the south of the Peloponnese, or to bite the bullet and pay for the Corinth Canal. After an evening spent with Martin and Gill on 'Sapphire' we were absolutely decided on the Canal route, and not least because of the battering our friends Kate and Davy were having with the meltemi in the South Aegean. We'd seen enough of the Ionian islands, lovely though they are, at times it seems that half the world's yachts must be here at one time, and it was still only July. The dreaded August holiday season was just about to start, and the first Italian holiday boats were starting to arrive. Time to be off in search of new adventures......

For those that are interested in these things, in this 3 month period in Greece we paid for only one nights mooring fees, at Gouvia (€50), the other nights were at anchor or on a free quay. We paid for water only twice, once at Gaios- €7 for a tank fill which was straight out of the reservoir and green, and €3 at Nidri on the Neilson pontoon - charter companies do have their uses after all, particularly when all the boats have gone out for the week. We have not plugged into mains power since leaving Vibo, all our charging is from solar panels and the wind generator, or as a by-product of motoring from place to place, except for running the 1kW petrol generator a handful of times using no more than 5l of petrol. The remainder of our budget we ate and drank in numerous tavernas and very good it was too!

Martin, Linda, Davy, Kate, Norman, Jill, Stu  at the fabulous 'Ionion' 

David, Linda, Ollie, Martin, Dave, Pam, Stu at Vathy

A passage plan from Italy to Greece, 28th April 2008

How not to do it!

Goodbye Stromboli

The cruisers who have spent long periods of time in port always seem to have a lot of well-meaning advice for those who've decided to depart. Some Danish friends in Vibo gave us 3 important pieces of information for our trip:
1)Never transit the Messina Straits when the moon is visible in the sky day or night.
2)Always ask the local fishermen before you leave, what the real weather is in the Strait as they are in touch with their colleagues there, and it could be much worse than you imagine.
3)When you find a LIDL stock up for 6months, as you never know when you'll see another.

Well, as we roared downwind towards the Straits of Messina, we had no idea about the moon, and we couldn't converse with the fishermen as we don't speak enough Italian, let alone the local language, however we did have a carefully researched and prepared times and dates of the tidal streams at Messina and we were on course to arrive just after the tide turned southwards, as advised by Rod Heikell in his excellent pilot book. It's not hard to work out– 4h30mins after HW Gibraltar.  As we approached the Strait in mobile phone range of Sicily we plugged the mobile into the laptop, found the Italian meteorology site and looked up the actual wind speed and direction from the weather buoy at Messina. All very modern and simple and clever!

This beats the Solent any day!

So we had a great sail in flat water through the Strait and didn't see a single whirlpool- we were a little disappointed! We watched small fishing boats motor straight for the middle of the charted position of Chrybdis, the main whirlpool and .....nothing happened, he didn't even get sucked into the bowels of the earth -amazing. At one point Scilla, of the Odyssey fame, who lives in a cave on the eastern side, with 12 feet and six long necks with horrible heads that hang down and pluck innocent sailors from their ships.... tried to steal my hat, but I grabbed it back and put it firmly on my head again, wagging my finger ! That told her!
It was already a long day, but we sailed on past Reggio de Calabria, winner of the verruca award for the toe of Italy. We turned the bottom corner of SW Italy in 7 knots and Stuart gripped the wheel grinning from ear to ear. We went on past Rocella Ionica, which we now know has a free marina ( free, yes that's right free and in Italy too!!) and on up the coast towards Crotone. The pilot book makes Crotone sound like a contender for the athletes foot award of the instep of Italy, so we hooked the mobile phone up again and got the most recent forecast, clever eh?

The tippy toe of Italy in the background. We're doing 7 knots but upright and no splashes!

Under several layers of insulation despite the sun !

The calm before the storm

The forecast was SW force 5 for 24 hours followed by calms followed by easterlies for days to come.  This meant we go for it, or rest in Crotone for a week rather than burn diesel and fight the wind (Crotone does have a free harbour wall we found out later). As the wind got up we pointed the boat on the only tolerable point of sail in the resultant boiling seas which, hey presto, pointed us to the bottom end of Corfu. We decided this was some sort of divine message to get on with it, so we set the sails, crawled into the corner of the cockpit and held on tight for the roller coaster/water slide ride of our lives. Thank goodness for Marks and Spencers tinned curry, as you can just slop it in a pan and warm it up, as darkness descended and we took it in turns to ride the 'Black Hole' roller coaster in the moonless night. I found that one of the few benefits of spending the winter rolling in  our marina berth is that I no longer appear to be seasick !

As dawn arrived the wind decreased to a tolerable level and we slopped about in the leftover sea. Within a couple of hours the wind started to rise to greet us from Greece, right on the nose – what an unwelcome greeting to a new country. By this time it was a long way round to change course, so we plugged away for hours and hours the last 20 miles to Corfu. As we rounded the tip of the island and could sail north round the inside we tried to unfurl our genoa (the sail at the front) and it wouldn't undo. This was due to the duck tape that we'd repaired the sacrificial UV strip with, which had undone and stuck to itself the wrong way round. After lots of prodding with long sticks and swear words, Stu climbed wearily into his harness and I winched him up, as he shimmied up the furled sail looking at it murderously with a sharp knife. Two minutes later and the naughty tape was removed and we could unfurl the genoa with blue bits of cloth dangling off and sail again.

Gouvia Marina, Corfu

We'd chosen Gouvia marina as our first destination on Corfu for many reasons.
1)Mostly we wanted a safe thing to tie the boat to so we could sleep off our exertions
2)We needed to wash the boat of salt crystals to half way up the mast and get ourselves washed too
3)We were paranoid about checking into Greece and the pilot book said we could do this at the marina
4)It was rumoured that we could fill our English gas bottles here.

After 2 days, 2 nights and a day at sea, we gratefully handed over our lines to a very helpful Greek lad who spoke good English. 'How much is it here?'  we asked. He said he thought about €35, but 'the office is closed for the day, you must go in the morning'.
The marina is a huge 1000 boat complex alive with all sorts of activity at this time of year as everyone tries to get their boat ready for the start of the season. It has modern facilities and overpriced shops and food outlets. After the washing was done we walked through the boutiques out the door of the compound into the Greek Kondokali village behind. We enjoyed our first experience of a smoky 'spiteria' where lamb and pork are cooked over coals on a spit – served with Greek salad and lots of wine to help us forget the ravages of the last few days. We got chatting to a mad Swedish ex pat who insisted we go along to a local nightclub to 'help' her with her friend, a Norwegian with some sort of degenerative nervous disease. All we really wanted to do was sleep, but she was as mad as a snake, so it was hard to reason. We were treated to the most interesting real Greek dancing that we've seen to date, which looks like 2 cossacks flinging themselves across the room at each other......or it could have been some sleep deprived vision.

Next morning we found the marina office and they requested a whopping €50 per night. 'How many nights will you be staying?'  –' We're off!' we said in unison.
The port police office was closed so we couldn't check in anyway, but we did manage to sort the gas bottles once we found the helpful and resourceful Franz of Force 5 chandlers.  You are able to visit the marina for 2 hours free of charge so we could return and pick up the gas another day. So far we have not had to resort to local gas bottles, despite being told it's not possible to fill UK bottles outside the UK. We have 2 x 13kg bottles which when the first is empty, givs us about 3 months to find a friendly refilling station with the correct attachments. So far so good.

So after achieving only 2 ½ of our 4 objectives at Gouvia we moved onto Corfu town old harbour to search out the port police. These town harbours seem to have no rules of engagement, usually no-one to tell you where to berth, and more fortunately, often no-one to take any money from you either.
This was our first harbour of its sort and still being naïve we asked a NZ boat if we could tie alongside them temporarily. As it turned out Pete and Raye on Saliander were great fun and good company and were happy for us to tie up to their 55 foot beautiful Tayana for several days. They in turn were tied to two old day tripper boats who seemed to be going nowhere. They were headed west towards the Balearics and Corsica, so we swapped information with them, as they had spent a lot of time in Greece and Turkey.

After several trips ashore we finally found the port police and went in to request our 'transit log'. No-one appeared to know what we were talking about, and various officials were called out of their offices and wandered off again muttering and scratching their heads. We seemed to be asking for something very unusual, but as the pilot book states (and other sources) every yacht over 10m must have one and present it at port police offices throughout Greece for the official stamp. No-one has any idea what function it serves, including the port police themselves. Eventually we parted with an arbitrary sum of €44 and were given an oversized, not quite A3 heavy paper document, with 5 pages of spaces for official stamps for whenever you enter and leave a Greek port – despite the fact that we are EU citizens in an EU flagged boat within Greece.  But at least the EU have made them ditch the illegal 'cruising tax'.


Corfu Town is lovely to wander through the narrow street and wide open parks (where the Brits taught them to play cricket apparently). There are plenty of tourist tat shops and bright glaring white people emerging from the daily cruise ships that stop here, but it still has a homely Greek atmosphere. We set about sorting out our Greek phone, hoping to recreate our mobile phone internet access that we had in Italy. After visiting all the mobile phone shops in Corfu with no luck and lots of bewildered staff, we met Xaris at the Vodafone shop who thought he might be able to provide just the thing. Unfortunately none of the Greek networks offer mobile phone data SIMs/packages on a Pay-as-You-go basis. He told us we'd need a Greek address, a credit card, a Greek tax number and to sign up to a monthly contract of €17,  and we could use our existing Italian mobile phone as the modem. We offered up our receipt of one nights stay at Gouvia marina as proof of our address, he fudged our tax number with lots of zeros and the next day we were on contract. It did take 3 days of increasingly desperate calls to the Greek Vodafone helpline, but it worked eventually and has continued to ever since. So, well done Xaris! Our friends tried the following month, and were told that you can no longer get a contract without a Greek tax number, which you can get on the internet, but we all fear what the tax implications of having that number might be!!

Next task was to stock up at LIDL. Unhappily all LIDL  branches are way out of town and we are of course car-less. Getting a taxi back to town kind of makes the savings less worthwhile.
However, we had spotted the happy yellow sign from the sea, so we asked around as to whether it is acceptable in Greece to anchor anywhere you like, and no-one could come up with a reason why not. So we carefully motored into the bay opposite the sign and dropped our anchor as close to the shore as we dared. We took the dinghy ashore at the only likely spot and hobbled through the undergrowth and wayside rubbish to the side of a major road. We crossed 2 lanes of traffic in one direction, then 2 lanes in the other direction and were outside LIDL.

Bearing in mind our Danish friends advice to stock up for 6 months, we filled our trolley to overflowing with cheap beer, fruit juice, water, and other heavy items. Outside the shop we paused for thought. There was no way to take the trolley across the road as several kerbs and central reservations and, needless to say, unrelenting traffic blocked our way. There was nothing for it but to unload the trolley onto the pavement and in relays we negotiated the 4 lanes of traffic, kerbs, central reservation, wayside rubbish and undergrowth, waded out to the dinghy and transferred our loads into it. There was just room for us to get in too, and we gingerly motored our top-heavy dinghy back to the yacht, to unload it on deck, then into our deepest darkest storage lockers.  All this on the equivalent of a hot summers day in England - and you wonder what we do all day?!! In this way we managed about  6 weeks worth of supplies – there was no way we were going back for more.

With all our tasks accomplished, we were ready to move on, but first we had to 'check out' of Corfu and get a matching exit stamp in our Transit Log. We tied up in the commercial port and went into the Port Police office again proffering our oversized document. Again there was head scratching and muttering, officials coming and going, and then we were directed into a small office where a girl who should still have been at school wielded a quadruplicate book and entered all our details into it. She requested the grand sum of 86 cents for 'checking out'. A bit of confusion followed as they don't have any facility to provide change, and I had to return to the boat to rummage around for all the spare cents I could find. We were quite happy to keep them waiting. After returning and paying exactly 86 cents, mostly in small copper coins, we were given one of the quadruplicate sheets and sent to the next office to get the stamp and be written in the big book of coming and going. What a farce! Now we can start our big Greek sailing holiday.