Thásos (Part 1)

I’m having problems uploading some of the blog entries with, for example, photo captions missing and so I have decided to try breaking them down into smaller parts to upload and see if that works.

Samothráki behind us   

Greek biscuits   

At 1045 on 19 May we left Samothráki. It was a leisurely start because we needed to go food shopping and because there was only about 25 miles to sail to the next island, Thásos.

As Samothráki slipped away behind us we had a morning coffee and sampled the first of the shopping treats; some Greek biscuits. These are individual to each bakery and we’ve had a variety of flavours. These particular ones had pine nuts on the outside and were a very nice addition to coffee time.

Thásos island ahead under the cloud   

Calculating and plotting sun sights   

Ahead, hiding under some clouds, was the larger island of Thásos. Like Samothráki it’s also quite mountainous but it’s quite a lot larger. The 4½ hour passage nicely fitted across the noon sun so I spent the middle part of the passage taking 3 sets of sights, working the corrections and then plotting the results. Despite my meridian passage sights being very inconsistent (sextant operator shuffling around errors!) when averaged out and plotted with the other 2 sights it put us as a mile away from our actual position at midday. Briefly I thought I might have heard an accusation of fudging the figures but I decided that was probably just the wind in the rigging!

All that juggling books and the sextant seemed to make the the pasage go by very quickly and in what seemed like no time we were making our way along the northern side of the island. It’s only about 4 miles between Thásos and mainland Greece and we saw an amazing number of ferry crossings between the two. Samothráki’s tourism was suffering with barely a ferry every other day and here we were seeing about 3 crossings every hour.

Thásos has been quarried for its prized marble since the Bronze Age 

On the island to our left we could hear the odd explosion or 2 and see the clouds of dust from the marble quarries. Thásos has been quarried for its prized marble since the Bronze Age and clearly it is still big business.

Thásos’ new harbour   

We made our way around the headland which was obscuring the port and saw even more ferries moored up; we counted 6 in total and later on a hydrofoil turned up as well. There are actually 2 ports here. The new port, which we were aiming for was ahead of us…

Thásos’ old harbour with the ancient theatre just visible above L from the town   

… and to our left was the old harbour. This is the ancient military harbour. The ruins of the ancient city are above it and we could see the ruined theatre on the hillside above. There used to be an ancient commercial harbour to the left of the military one (as one views the picture above) but that has long since been destroyed by nature.

We made our way into the new harbour and found a suitable spot to moor up alongside. It was all very easy provided that we stayed away from the part of the quay painted with a yellow stripe. We discovered later that that area is where the hydrofoil and large fishing trawlers moored.

Soon after arriving the wok was sizzling!   

Limnos wine   

Almost as soon as we were settled, the rest of the shopping treats from Samothráki appeared. We’d found the commercial fishmongers there and got hold of a kilo of fresh squid and prawns [Ed: half a kilo of each, not 2 kilos total – that would have been really piggy!]. That called for some immediate feast production! The wok was busy sizzling with salt and pepper squid and then garlic prawns whilst we made tzatziki and Greek salad. At the same time other pans bubbled with the makings of spicy Spanish patatas bravas whilst the smell of toasting pittas wafted from the grill. Add in some nice Limnos wine and we had enough food for 4. It was a fabulous first night feast in Thásos.

Thásos, Greece