There
was supposed to be a lunar eclipse last night. So we set the alarm to wake us up at 4am to see it. When we got up we could see no moon at
all, but that had nothing to do with the eclipse. It was entirely clouded over. Not only that but as we put our heads outside the cabin it
began to rain! So we gave up, took
down the wind scoop so that rain did not come in through the forward cabin
hatch and went to bed.
We
were awakened by a lot of noise and shouting on the shore. When we went to see what it was about
we saw a large group of immigrants, presumably rescued from the sea last night
on the balcony of an official building (Police Station?) with policemen trying
to organise them. Eventually they
all seemed to have been accounted for and then they went to the ferry
terminal. There was the usual
majority of young men, but also this time a lot of children and some women. On shore Richard heard someone say that
over 100 had arrived over night.
That is probably more than the population of this small island.
The
morning was very grey with a bit of rain.
So we took it easy and had a very late start and did not get away until
11:30. When we got up to the
cockpit we were a bit surprised to find it covered in bits of black thread-like
bits. We thought at first that is
might have been left over from the BBQ last night. But as we left the harbour we saw that there was a big bush
fire on the hills outside and the bits were from that! Later we saw a seaplane scooping up
water from the sea and dropping it on the fire!
We
were pleasantly surprised to find 11 knots of wind blowing just outside the
harbour and for a change it was not exactly on the nose, but was an upwind
sail. However we were able to sail
all the way to the island of Arki, about 15 miles away. It was a nice force 4 all the way. We only had to turn the engine on to
get into the bay itself. We are in
a little place called Port Stretto.
There are two parts to the bay.
We went into the first, which has a taverna which has mooring
buoys. We hoped to be able to pick
one up, but found there were only 4 and they were all occupied. The book suggests you can anchor there,
but there was little room and the bottom seemed to be mostly weed. So we went to the other side where
there were 4 or 5 boats anchored.
The book suggests that the holding is good, with sand and weed. This was not our experience. We tried three times to get the anchor
to bite, only to find it dragging.
We then went further in and put the anchor down, but we are still not
entirely convinced that it has dug in well. We are swinging a lot and there has been more wind than
expected - about 10-13 knots. The
real problem is that we are quite close to another boat behind us. We have set the plotter to show if we
move and so far it looks OK, but we might have a worrisome night!
This
would have been a lovely spot to swim off the boat, and a number of the
occupants of the other boats were swimming. However, it really is too cool for me. There has been a lot of cloud, so the
sun hasn’t warmed things up a lot.
With that and the wind, I am quite chilled and neither of us fancied a
swim.
This
is another episode which won’t get posted for a couple of days. We have certainly used up all our
credit on the internet machine.
Richard used his UK phone, paying the £3 a day charge for international
access. That was OK in Agathonisi,
but here there is no 3G signal! So
we are not connected to the outside world.
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