Léros Órmos Xerokambos

On Saturday 27 August it seemed important to make a good plan and then completely ignore it. We had planned to go to Kalimnos town, then we decided on Órmos Emborios at the north end of Kalimnos. In the end we went to Órmos Xerokambos on Leros. However, as Nicky pointed out later, it wasn’t that that we had completely ignored the plan, just that we’d updated it as we went along.

But to start at the beginning…… We got very excited about what seemed to be a nice northerly breeze wind when we left Knidos. We hoisted the sails and started to think that we’d have a pleasant beat up to Kos and then a great reach across the top, but once clear of the headland the wind died. After an hour motoring north, the wind really did start to build, and quite quickly, and it wasn’t long before we had 2 reefs in the main, the staysail and just a little of the genoa set. That sailplan worked admirably and BV scooted along as we tacked our way across the gap between Turkey and Kos. The wind was being compressed and accelerated through the gap and so it was lively sailing (hence no pictures in case I dropped my camera).

Passing Kalimnos with no wind!   

Once clear of the Kos/Bodrum gap, our plan had been to head west to Kalimnos town and stop for the night. That seemed even more sensible when the strong wind that we had been enjoying died to nothing in the shadow of Kalimnos island. We motored for 40 minutes and then the wind came back in earnest. We started to make such good progress that we decided to move our destination a few miles north to Órmos Emborios near the northern end of Kalimnos. There was a bit of tacking involved but on our final tack the wind backed a little and we realised that we could potentially make a bay on the southern end of Nísos Léros, Órmos Xerokambos.

Órmos Xerokambos on Léros   

Ten miles further north than Kalimnos, anchoring in Órmos Xerokambos would put us in a much more favourable position to set off west in the morning. We dropped sails in the shelter of the bay and motored to the head of it to find a spot to anchor. The bay was surprisingly popular. All along the northern end of it the tavernas have laid mooring buoys. We had read that these should be treated with extreme caution as, in the past, several have dragged or broken free from their moorings entirely. We could see that some really quite large yachts were moored on the buoys closest in to the shore. From the small spacing between the buoys it seemed obvious that they had been laid for smaller yachts but, exactly as the warning had suggested, crews of larger yachts seemed to tie on and then be amazed when the small concrete mooring block lifted or dragged in a blow.

Órmos Xerokambos   

Fortunately the shelter was good and so we didn’t expect to see any dramas. Nonetheless, we sat to our own ground tackle, anchoring on the edge of the mooring area in about 8 metres.

View south towards Nísos Kalimnos   

This was just an overnight passage stop for us and so we stayed on board and cooked up a feast with our food trophies from Turkey. The flash-fried hot peppers with garlic were a particular success, reminding us of the Pimientons de Padrón we had enjoyed in Galicia. Unfortunately, the good night’s sleep we had been hoping for was less successful as one of the tavernas had employed a live musician to play traditional Greek music to, it seemed, the whole of Greece! Earplugs made little, if any, difference and Zorba eventually only stopped at 0415!!

After that, the alarm’s early call was even less welcome than usual but it was time to see if our gamble to head north before west was going to pay off. Sailing hard on the wind, just a small variation in the wind direction could make the difference between us having to head southwest to Astipálaia or perhaps, more hopefully, making one of the islands to the southeast of Naxos.

Órmos Xerokambos , Greece