Órmos Voufalou

By the time that we woke up on the morning of Tuesday 4 August, one of the other yachts that had gone through the bridge with us, a small German LM called Uti, had already left the anchorage and second, Anastasia, was preparing to leave. We up-anchored shortly after 1000 and set the genoa and single reefed main in 15kts northwesterly wind.

New bridge (and cement factory) looking south

The big, new bridge is 36m off the water and our airdraft is, conservatively, 20m, so we had no compunction about sailing under it at 7kts. Even Nicky didn’t feel the need to keep repeating to herself ‘I have done the tidal calculations OK, I have done the tidal calculations OK’ as BV sailed underneath – the masthead never looked in any danger.

The view of the bridge looking north is far better than that of it looking south    

We continued southwards, past Khalkís shipyard, through another narrowing where we had to gybe a couple of times in short succession and then the channel opened out and turned more easterly. For a time we followed Anastasia and wondered if we were headed to the same place, but they veered off more to the north, most likely bound for Karavos. After a couple of hours of reasonable sailing the wind started to become fickle both in strength and direction. Over the next 2 hours we ended up on most points of sailing and had to motor a little too. And then, just 30mins out of Voufalo, the wind filled in again properly, this time nearly hard on the nose and at about 17kts! Rather than reef with such a short distance to go, we were lazy and rolled up the genoa and unfurled the staysail for the final sprint to the finish.

Voufalou is almost entirely landlocked and though the wind was reasonably brisk outside in the approaches there was very little wind in the bay itself when we arrived.

We anchored in 6m just astern of Uti, the German yacht that had left the Khalkís anchorage before we were up. We swam, though the water was disappointingly murky, and Nicky spotted a sunken dory close under BV that we had not seen as we anchored. About 2 hours after we had arrived we were joined by an Italian yacht, the final one of the four that had gone through the bridge the previous night. We wondered if the 3 of us would end up in the same anchorage the next evening too.

Órmos Voufalou, Greece