Nísos Léros

Knight’s castle above Pandeli, Léros

With another day of good forecast winds (this time Force 5-6) we were looking forward to a brisk sail from Pátmos to Pandeli on Léros. Though the wind wasn’t as strong as we had expected, and even dropped off towards the end of the trip, we still had a good sail and, for the first time in several days, we only used the engine to get in and out of the anchorage. En route we passed a couple of yachts at anchor off a remote island, south of Lipsi, and we were overtaken by the gulet we had been moored alongside in the harbour at Pátmos.

Pandeli lies halfway down the east coast of Leros in a lovely setting. The high ground curves around the bay with a beach and a small harbour. The village’s buildings are painted a variety of colours (though white and cream inevitably predominate) and are bedecked with bougainvillea and other flowering plants. On one of the ridge lines high above the village stand half a dozen windmills, whilst on the other is the Knight’s castle at Plátanos (Lero), the island’s capital.

We followed small Dutch yacht towards the harbour but as they hesitated it was clear that there would not be space in there for us, even if there was for them.

Rather than anchor and take a long line ashore, beam to the wind, at the edge of the harbour, we moved further into the cove to the southwest and free-anchored instead. It took a couple of attempts to get the anchor to hold and even then it only seemed to dig in about half way (though it held BV at 1700rpm), so it is likely that the bottom is rock covered by a thin layer of sand. We were very grateful for our trusty Rocna anchor as it turned out that the anchor of a yacht close to us did not did into the bottom at all and just lay on its side, despite their efforts to make it dig in. Happily, in the bay the wind died down as the evening approached and remained light all night so the anchors barely took any strain at all.

We spent the afternoon starting to catch up with the backlog of blogging, before swimming and then taking the dinghy ashore. Interestingly, when we got around to the harbour and the beach off the village, we found the wind quite a lot stronger than it was in the bay in which we were anchored, though our pilot book suggests that the harbour area has the better protection from the wind. We spent some time wandering around the village before posting our afternoon’s efforts online over a beer at a café. We never did get up to the castle – something for a return visit; Panedli’s a lovely place and definitely somewhere to come back to.

Nísos Léros, Greece