Nísiros Palon

Dawn at Órmos Kalotaritissa   

Nicky’s plan to head east involved a very early start on 12 August; we even beat the sun at getting up. We raised anchor at 0600 and motored around the western tip of Amorgós as the sun broke the horizon.

Windmills and the white Hozoviótissa monastery   

Once we had made our way around to the south of Amorgós and started heading east, we could see a line of windmills up on the ridgeline and down and right from them the whitewashed 11^th century Byzantine Panagía Hozoviótissa monastery clinging to the cliff 180 metres up. This is home to a revered icon of the Virgin Mary which came from Palestine, and 3 monks who apparently treat every visitor to a shot of alcoholic and spicy rakómelo. Perhaps worth a visit next time we stop at Amorgós.

The passage east would be either 75 or 120 miles depending upon our progress and final choice of destination. To keep the speed up, initially we motored [Ed: unfortunately for quite some while], and then as the wind built, we set sail and raised the spinnaker. The wind was nothing like as strong as had been forecast until we started to approach the western end of Kós. Here the wind picked up nicely to a little above our (self-imposed) 15kt wind limit for the spinnaker, so we lowered the kite and poled out the genoa in its place. Typically, the wind then dropped off a little so we could have kept the spinnaker up! However, the genoa kept us going at 6 knots as we headed towards the northern edge of Nísos Nísiros where we had decided to stop for the night at Palon harbour.

Palon   

The entrance is still shallow, with 2.7 metres the least depth that we saw but once inside the harbour it’s a bit deeper. The crosswind made getting BV to go backwards a little awkward but after a couple of pirouettes we were able to moor stern to on the quay. As we were settling ourselves in we heard an American skipper negotiating with some yachts who had dropped their anchors over his and noted that they would be leaving at a similar time to us in the morning.

Palon   

Palon is a nice harbour but after quite a long day we didn’t really make the most of it, preferring to eat on board. The planned early turn-in was somewhat scuppered by a couple of e-mails which needed replies but eventually we crashed out and slept well.

‘Splendido’ leaving Palon      

In the morning I walked around the harbour to take some pictures and noticed that the American with the tangled anchor was the skipper of Splendido. We had not met Michael, Daniel or Jeremy before but we’ve spoke to them regularly on the HF radio MedNet. We said hello, worked out that we were both heading towards Rhodes and agreed to try to meet up there. Meanwhile the other anchor-tangle yachts were busy lifting their anchors in the correct order to prevent chaos so Splendido’s crew had to get going. They slipped away without any dramas whilst the other yachts moored up again. We too needed to be making tracks and so followed Splendido east a short while later.

Nísiros  Palon, Greece