Kythnos – Part 2

15

The night from hell….the abridged version

Sleep has eluded us and Mother nature has thrown a fastball at us, or a curve ball, or probably it would be more appropriate to say she flung a fast curve ball. The winds have picked up and the weather has worsened. We are beginning to give up on sleep. Kirk had far more faith in the anchor that I did. We had been on the anchor for 24 hours…but it just didn’t feel right to me. Unfortunately, at least in this case, I was right. The next 12 hours became the “proving ground”.

We had crawled into our bunk and were just beginning to doze off when the winds picked up. The gusts pushed the boat in some cases at a 25 to 30 degree angle. A touch un-nerving. The dinghy tried to blow away and we lashed it down further. Anchor watch began in earnest. The winds gusted from all directions but the majority, at least at first, came from the E we saw it go up to about 20 m/s on the meter, we both think it was up to higher than that. All fine and dandy because we had run a stern line and had two anchors out, one forward and one aft. We sat and watched the winds speed and the depth. Unfortunately, my greatest fear was realized when the wind direction changed to S-SW at high velocity. The boat began to swing from side to side and we feared for our main anchor. It held….for awhile…then it broke. At about 4:00 am we found ourselves broadside to the shore and being pushed by a roughly 40 knot wind onto land. We were still firmly attached to our stern line and stern anchor which were now causing us more difficulties than assistance but they were both strung so tight that we couldn’t do anything. Kirk was at the helm attempting to maintain control of the vessel while I was climbing in and out of the front hatch to try to deal with the anchor. When I would try to pull the anchor in, the force of the wind and boat combined would pull the anchor chain off the bow roller and jam the windlass and I was left to try to haul it back on. I truly thought I was going to lose a couple of fingers in the process. I tried the windlass handle as a pry bar but couldn’t budge it….we had to play a waiting game for a wave that was big enough and strong enough to knock it back onto the bow roller.

During all of this I could se a light in the distance. A sailboat had been anchored and stern tied in the small bay on the outside of the sandbar behind the island. I had seen its anchor light on and could now see that it too was struggling. They disappeared after awhile and we have no idea what happened to them, they had to leave the bay and head out to sea in the dark. We had wind, but they must have had it so much worse where they were because they had high seas coming in at them as well. See the red X on the chart below for where they were. The next day the waves were crashing up both sides of the sandbar, no boat could have survived in there…we pray that they are safe…..

Once I got the anchor loose, we were left to fight the wind but we were still attached via a line to a tree on shore and a stern anchor. Kirk tried to release the stern anchor, but we it was too tight and the wind was pushing us ashore. We had been watching our depth gauge closely all night, but the thing suddenly began to jerk towards 0.0 m too often but there was no sound or feeling of things going bump in the night. Kirk got a break when the boat lurched back a bit and there was some slack on the stern anchor, we dumped it. Now we just had to deal with the stern line. We were both still in pajamas so Kirk didn’t have his Leather man handy, I bolted below and grabbed mine, the stern line was under so much pressure that I just touched it with the knife and it snapped loose…we were free, but grounded momentarily. Luckily it was sand and nothing hard or damaging, and a wave picked us up just enough that with the engine wide open, she pulled free. We were NOT going to lose this boat if we cold help it!

We fought the wind and called depth numbers out until we were (we hoped) in the middle of the bay and at about 7m where we dropped the main anchor again. Thankfully it grabbed well and we dumped about 40 m of chain down behind it. It was now about 5 am. Kirk held the boat in reverse at idle for the next 10 hours to keep it from swinging and bouncing too badly as we feared the anchor being pulled out again. We bundled up in as much clothing as we could find, thankful that we had thought to bring fleece, full rain gear and wool gloves along, we needed all of it, and waited for dawn. Things just seem better in the light of day. When the sun rose we could see that one of the fishermen’s boats had been blown off of its mooring and flung ashore.

We watched the mouth of the bay through binoculars to see what was going on out in the open water, all we could see was that the water seemed to rise up like a wall and the breaking waves hitting the point were easily smashing 50 feet high. Best guess is that the seas were probably about 20 feet out there. As the day wore on we saw a freighter go out, then two ferries. To see two ferries meant that even they had been holed up.

Through all of this, the VHF radio was eerily quiet, not even a weather forecast. We finally decided to call Olympia Radio and find out what the prediction was for the rest of the day, neither one of us could stomach the thought of the dark in this bay again. I called several times and finally got a response, comfort at last I thought, someone is out there! I was asked to change to channel 26 and when I got through the Greek male voice at the other end demanded “What do you want!” I said I wanted a weather forecast, he gave me tomorrows, I said no, I want to know what these winds are going to do, how long would they last. The reply was a very crabby” No one can know the weather, no one can know what the winds will do”. Great, fat lot of good that did. I wanted to find out if there was room at the quay two bays over in case we ever did get out of here but I never again received a response. We have pretty much determined that the VHF radio in Greek waters is purely for decoration on a boat.

So we waited, and waited, and waited. We counted out the wind speed to each other, watched the mouth of the bay for signs of change, and waited. We could see our stern line had washed ashore so we knew we could come back for it if we could ever get out of here. The winds dropped a bit, enough for us to untie the dinghy and haul it up onto the front deck, one paddle came apart and went in the water. Now it became a mental hurdle. The winds had dropped considerably and were holding relatively consistently between 9 and 10 m/s with just getting the odd gust to 12 or 13 m/s. We could see that things had calmed a bit out in the open, the waves crashing against the rocks were slightly smaller and the cresting waves were fewer. Then we saw a sailboat bounce by, then two others. They were floundering, but making way and going down sea. We just needed to go 2 miles around the corner to get to safe harbour….Merikhas was so close, just straight out about a mile, then a 90 degree turn, and straight in.

We finally worked up the courage when the winds seemed to be fairly steady at 8-9 m/s. The thought of another night in the dark and unknown winds here was worse than the thought of going out in the rough sea. The anchor was firmly in and took some work to retrieve but when we got it we headed out. The corner was the worst because the waves were meeting the narrowing but once through there the waves, although huge (best guesstimate about 15 foot…when in them we couldn’t see out and the tops were way above us) were relatively predictable and weren’t cresting. We wove our way out at a 45 degree angle without too much difficulty, then did a 90 degree turn and semi-surfed back. It would have been an easy 20 minute trip in normal circumstances, but it took closer to an hour in these waters.

We finally made it and were grateful to see a space at the quay. It was full with race boats, but there was a bit of room. We fought a bit to dock it, this was our first experience at Mediterranean style docking, rare to go alongside here. We dropped the anchor, put out every fender we had, and began to back towards the concrete quay. The majority of the other boats were bow to, but that wasn’t an option for us as we had left our stern anchor back on the bottom of the bay. We got her in safely and now out of the wind, realized we were cooking in our multiple layers. We sat down and gave thanx that we were OK, and that the boat was OK.

One thing to note, it is odd to come here from North America where we are all so used to people helping you dock. Absolutely no one lends a hand here. You are either ignored, or yelled at if they think you are doing something wrong.

We changed into fresh clothes and went ashore to see if we could find a car rental company, we did. We rented a little car and headed back to the bay to see if we could retrieve the things we had lost. The stern line (three 100 foot lines tied together) was still on shore but a pile of knots, it took me about 30 minutes to untangle it and turn it back into three coiled lines. Kirk put on a mask and snorkel and started to look for the anchor, he found it fairly quickly, we’d had the forethought to take note of both where we originally placed it and where we cut it loose. But it was too deep. The line went shoreward and he was able to get hold of it and pull it almost in. We tied it off to a tree and I went to see if the fishermen might help us. The younger one spoke some English but did not want to put a boat in the water at that time, too late and still choppy. He said he would help tomorrow and we should come back at nine o’clock.

Back to Merikhas for some much needed food and sleep. We didn’t sleep so much as we went unconscious. We learned a lot about ourselves and each other and what we are capable of dealing with in the past 40 hours.