Kira Panayía

We left Sígri on the island of Lesvos at dawn on 4 June. We had wanted to head further north to Limnos but the wind was strong enough to make that passage a long and uncomfortable beat. Instead we put 2 reefs in the main, unrolled a small handkerchief sized bit of the genoa and headed off west towards the Northern Sporades. Sígri is so sheltered because of a protective arc of islands and rocky outcrops. That’s good, but with low-lying reefs there is always risk in the wrong weather conditions. As we departed Sígri we saw the hull of a steel yacht that had ended up wrecked on one of the reefs and were quietly grateful for the accuracy of modern navigation equipment [Ed: albeit that such accuracy comes with its own dangers in areas where charts are based on surveys from the days before GPS].

We set off early to make the most of the wind for our 90 mile passage west, to make sure that we arived at our planned anchorage in daylight and because the wind was due to back to the west later on. It was a largely uneventful passage although we did hook up a large fish of some sort. As I started to reel in, the line went slack and we discovered that one of the hooks had snapped and the other was bent out. Clearly, I will now be able to tell a fisherman’s tale of “the one that got away”; it must have been huge!

Nisos Pipéri

Our route took us past Nisos Pipéri which is a nature reserve with a 3 mile exclusion zone. Monk seals are the particular animal that the exclusion zone is designed to protect but the whole area, including several other islands and our destination, is in a Marine conservation area: the National Marine Park of Northern Sporades.

As we continued our passage, we picked up a hitchhiker trying to get to Nisos Pipéri. There was a blur of something acoss the cockpit and then the largest dragonfly we’d ever seen settled on a rope to shelter from the wind. It stayed with us for an hour and then, as we passed to the south of the island, it flew off, presumaby grateful for the lift.

As forecast, the wind did back to the west, so what had started as a beam reach ended with us hard on the wind although by this stage it had also dropped considerably. Unfortunately, it continued to drop such that we had to motor the last 20 miles. We took the opportunity to enjoy a cool beer watching the islands in the distance glisten in the sunshine.

With the wind expected to increase again from the north we aimed for a sheltered cove, órmos Kira Panayía, on the south side of the island of Kira Panayía. The anchorage at the head of the bay, hidden behind a small island, is very picturesque but we had been beaten there by 5 or 6 other yachts so there was no space for us to spend the night there too.

Instead, we moved to the small bay immediately to the west and spent the night there in solitary splendour.

órmos Kira Panayía, Greece