ocean-pilgrim

After a great tour of the North Western Cyclades we jumped from Tinos across to the northern end of Paros to a large bay called Naoussa. We’d been here once before in October in 2022 when we sat on the boat, alone in a howling meltemi for 7 days.  Our boat clocked over 2 nautical miles in that week as it rode back and forth on our anchor.  When we finally left we wondered if we’d ever come back as the memories we had weren’t so pleasant.  Clearly it was time to make some new ones!

 And we did find a little piece of paradise on the western side of the bay in an aquamarine swimming pool that we came and went from over the next weeks. A few days here to sort out the details of life like phone plans and a meal out and then we headed down to Paros’s main town called Paroikia.

  We found a big well stocked grocery store (which was selling the elusive fish sauce I’d been hunting down for months), we wandered through the pretty streets of the old town and saw how the early Greek ruins had been repurposed into walls and churches.  Then we caught up with friends who had gone out of their way to say goodbye before they headed out of Greece for a few months.  Happy days. 

We also made time to go to the beautiful Byzantine Monastery and Church of Panagia Ekatontapiliani (meaning church with 100 gates) in town. Reported to be an exact (although smaller) copy of the Santa Sofia in Istanbul. It was commissioned the Christian Roman Emperor Constantine in the 3rd Century AD in honour of his mother who worshipped here on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land. She is reported to have taken refuge from a storm here. She never made it home from her pilgrimage.

But the weather forecast was changing and the wind was coming.  Rick was restless and wing foiling was calling.

He was keen to get back to the big wide foiling bay between Antiparos and the island of Despotico so we headed south and overnighted on the south coast of Paros before an unexpectedly windy trip into Despotico. We departed leaving our dinghy in the water and sailed across the Paros channel under a reefed Jib. It was a really great sail as the wind had just sprung up and there hadn’t been time for it to whip up any waves. 

The entrance to Despotico  is much like a vase.  You enter from the top then go through quite a narrow entrance and then once through it you are in a big bowl shaped bay. Neither of us had considered that the wind may have been accelerating through the ‘neck of the vase’. Yep, it was.  With the dinghy almost taking off and us both holding tightly to our bimini (the canopy that gives shade over the cockpit) as we thought it was either going to fly apart or rip to shreds I was yelling at Rick saying “Is this worth the chance of a foil?” “It’s only another mile and it’ll be all over” he yelled back.  Admittedly by this time we were doing 8 knots into the wind just under that reefed headsail. “It doesn’t look that good up in the anchorage I anxiously noted after doing my best to keep the binoculars steady. I was all for saving our property and turning around as the wind hit 38 knots but he pushed on and we popped through into much calmer waters, dropped the anchor and glowered at each other.

Some foiling was done.  A dinghy rescue was necessary in the gusty windy weather and a few days later we were off as the breeze abated and the foiling board was disassembled and the wings packed away.  As the jib came out it became apparent that while the dinghy and bimini survived unscathed the jib hadn’t.  Turns out it wasn’t made from a long life durable fabric.  It had started to delaminate anyway and the edge had lost some stitching and had a whole lot of small tears in it.  These tend to turn into large tears very quickly and the delamination couldn’t be fixed so a new sail was needed.  Ironically Rick had been chatting amiably to a couple of English guys on the boat next to us in Poros, retired engineers who had just purchased new sails.  Rick asked who they chose and why and was then sent an excel spreadsheet with all their quotes and why they went with the sailmaker they did.  Great! All the footwork had been done and we went with their number one choice knowing due diligence had been done.

We sent our old, damaged sail to Athens, to Alpha Sails and they used it to cut a pattern for the new one and generously repaired the worst of the tears on the old one so it would get us across the Aegean to Samos as we had a commitment there before the new sail would be ready. We had a super frustrating day trying to find the freight company’s office where we had to deliver the sail ourselves as there was no pickup serivce.  Greeks often don’t use street numbers and the lady in the office didn’t speak good enough English to tell us how to find it. She didn’t seem particularly interested in trying either. The Alpha Sails lady was on a holiday so we couldn’t get her to help (as her English was excellent) and finally when we picked up our hire car I asked the owner of the company. English to Greek google maps and a bit of faffing and we had the address behind the coffee roasters out of town on a lonely stretch of road near the turn off to the beach. Go figure!

After dropping off the 30 kilo sailbag and the most frustrating time trying to get money out on Rick’s credit card which refused to work I bought him a few beers and we went back to the boat a bit exhausted by it all. Then the day took a turn for the worse…yep it was possible as Rick knocked a full can of beer over his Macbook Pro.  A flood of beer over the keys, froth on the screen and tan nectar draining malevolently down through all the fan holes and vents and into the guts of the motherboard.  A quick google told us the worst but we did our best and took it into the main town of Paros to a repair shop (called iCrack (!!!) and he pulled it apart then declared it needed to go to Athens and could take 2 weeks to be assessed. But it was all in vain.  The laptop had drowned. What a day!

So we sat in Paros main town or in Naoussa awaiting the news and hanging out with friends who were visiting Paros on their Greek odyssey.  Rick hired some gear and went kite surfing with Simon while Eva and I hung out and we refilled our depleted cups in the company of good friends.

I’m not even going to go into the drama with the furling mainsail except to say it has been troublesome since our rigging was ‘tuned’ in Turkey early 2022. Rick managed to talk to a guy in Athens who clearly understood our problems and had great English.  The company agreed to let him come to Paros at our expense to sort it out.  While he identified the issue it wasn’t able to be fixed by him.  That said he re-tuned the rigging and Rick picked his brains and we agreed it was well worth the money…no using the main until the furler motor is fixed which will be at the end of the season.

3 weeks in Paros. It was long, it was hard but it was so good to have the perspective and laughter and friendship of people who we had met when we were all sailing in Australia in 1987.  They know the territory.  It helped a lot!

We were glad to head on though.  This time we took the same path as we did after the 2022 meltemi making a leap for Levitha, right over close to the Dodecanes and closing the door on this years’ unexpectedly long stay in the Cyclades. We had anticipated revisiting many favourite islands and anchorages but it wasn’t to be.  It was about injury (a sprained finger for me when we were taking the main down), breakages, repairs, new purchases and not about sailing much at all.

It’s definitely normal for things to break and go wrong on a boat and it’s always a steep learning curve both how to fix them and how we manage the issues that are more immediate, often more dangerous than living on land.  How we deal with the uncertainty and the impatience of wanting to just get going and for it all to be ok is always a work in progress. How we deal with each other under pressure has had a workout this year too. And we’re still here appreciating the privilege of this life and sharing it with each other despite it all.  The highs are higher and the lows are lower.  Yep. That’s for sure and we probably wouldn’t have it any other way…..well maybe!