Koukounaries Beach

When we left Loutraki on the morning of 25 July the sea was oily calm. With not even a hint of wind we left the sail cover on and looked to find something else to do to entertain us. The answer was, Fender Surfing! Before long we were towing 2 very happy visitors along in our wake, clinging on to the fenders we had secured to lines. We gradually increased the speeds and even got up to 6½ knots but we generally kept the speed down at around 3½ knots which we found to be the limit for bikini bottoms to stay on!

Fender surfing provided lots of entertainment but it did slow down progress. Not that that was really a problem as we were only moving 7 miles west to anchor off one of the islands to the southeast of Skíathos for a lunchstop.

Beach on Nísos Tsoungriá

We picked the beach on the south side of Nísos Tsoungriá because it was about half way to our evening destination, plus the water was just lovely.

The ‘stinky ferry’

Behind us in the distance we saw what we had taken to calling the “stinky ferry” for obvious reasons. But, in general, we just concentrated on the important jobs of lazing in the sun, swimming and snorkelling. Whilst Charlotte and Sophie explored ashore, Nicky and I let out all 100 metres of anchor chain and restowed it so that we wouldn’t have any more jams whilst trying to moor.

By 4pm we decided that it was time to move on, but only after a little more fender surfing.

An hour and a half later we were anchored off the beach at Koukounaries on the southwest tip of Skíathos. Not that we really needed to visit another beach but it was a convenient place to stop for the night to break up our journey back towards the Gulf of Volos.

Koukounaries, Greece