Well, after a lousy nights sleep bouncing around in the bay, we woke up to a weather system sitting overtop of us and decided to stay put. We took the dinghy out to the mouth of the bay to see what the seas were like and when we rounded the corner and found the waters to be quite large, we chose the cowardly route and decided to spend another night. Since our anchor held last night we know it’s OK. We watched the fishermen bring in their net and tried to see what they caught. Mostly small stuff but a couple of octopus too.
So since we chose to hang out on Kythnos today we went ashore around noon and walked about 4 or 5 km up into the hills and into Chora (Hora, Kithnos, Kythnos, take your pick, everything here seems to have at least three spellings or names) where we discovered the real Greece…and a complete lack of English. On our hike we passed through farmland and farmers riding donkeys to take goats milk into town. We met goats, sheep, donkeys, the odd cow and a flock of chickens with two turkeys for companions. The place is completely charming and we feel like we’ve stepped back in time to a day when life was just simpler. We took a detour down a donkey trail and stopped to look around when there was a kafuffle sort of below our feet and a herd of goats shot out of a low rock building that we were almost standing on. When we turned around, some cows emerged from one that was behind us. It explained the odd ruin-like buildings dotting the hillsides…they are all animal shelters. They, and the livestock, blend into the hillsides in the most amazing manner.
In Chora we managed to identify and buy a few provisions (a can of tomatoes, a can of corn, some bread, a chicken breast, a few potatoes, chamomile tea (that was a score for me!) and some tzatziki….all easily identified…could not for the life of me figure out how to get across that I was looking for oregano though, I knew the Italian word for it…but that didn’t get me far….the woman tried to give me spearmint tea, really ) and stopped at a little taverna for a beer and some calamari. It was the meatiest calamari we’ve ever had! Makes the stuff back home look like cheerios. While at the taverna the winds picked up even more and we hoped the boat was OK. We hiked back down into Apokreiosi happy to see the Pink Elephant still safely at anchor and our dinghy still tucked under the branches of a tree at the edge of the water. We made a quick trip to a taverna here in the bay that is run by the fishermen who had run the net the previous day, only to discover that they are not yet open for the season so no beer to be had. Back to the boat we go for a snack.
The winds are currently gusting to about 12 m/s and changing direction by the minute. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it and Olympic radio does in fact NOT broadcast weather every 6 hours as both the books say and our charter company informed us. So we are left to try and interpret as we go….cautiously. We have noticed that the weather systems seem to come from one direction, but that the winds and seas come from a completely different one.
We took the dinghy ashore and went for another hike having realized that we were not even able to get out of the bay to make the 2 mile ride around the corner to the main port. We hiked up the other way out of our bay along a dirt track and into a small valley on the other side of the ridge. Along the way we encountered a traffic jam…..a flock of sheep blocking the way…they didn’t much like us though and headed down the slope and out of our way. We came down into a little bay called Ormos Fikiadha that is separated from Ormos Kolona by a narrow sandbar. The wind was positively howling through the narrow. Two boats were tied up, we decided that we had the better spot….but headed back to check on our stern anchor because the winds had done a complete 180 and were coming down from the top of the ridge instead of from sea. We decided to tie a few long lines together and created ourselves a 300′ stern line that we ran to a tree on shore. We figure a three point tie ought to let us have a good nights sleep. So tonight we go to bed with a bow anchor, a stern anchor, and a stern line, the latter two off at 30 degrees to each other. This process of course provided further entertainment to our friends on shore, all of who had stopped what they were doing to watch us. We almost gave them more than we bargained for when I almost liberated the dinghy. It was blowing too hard to pull the dinghy onto the front deck so we pulled it up and tied it against the aft of the boat.
Just in the nick of time, the winds started gusting over 15 m/s…..our best estimation is that it is about 30 knots (34 mph/54 kph). A pretty good wind regardless of how you want to interpret it. We spent a bit of time tightening a LOT of lines…amazing how everything buzzes on a sailboat. So now we are well fed and tucked in for the night. Hopefully things will have calmed down tomorrow and we can move on.
