North West through the Cyclades

Our journey back to the Saronic Gulf for Athens has been very restful. We’ve mostly done short hops of 4 to 6 hours and anchored in beautiful, often virtually deserted bays. We have been lucky with the weather – clear skies, sunshine and mostly warm air although at sea it can still be chilly. The winds have occasionally been a little playful but that is only to be expected in these windy islands and is far from the worst they can do.


Manganari on Ios was amazingly blue and almost deserted. It was so beautiful we stayed for two days just chilling and falling in the warm water.






We then anchored between the small island of Andiparos and an even smaller one called Despotiko (odd name but we didn’t discover why). Excellent shelter, very wild and excellent swimming in cool but crystal clear water.
Next day we had a cracking sail to Sifnos on Spinaker and anchored in Vathi. This had a small and low key tourist presence with mostly Greek clients. It has a couple of nice little Tavernas right in the beach and a couple of surprisingly good mini-markets where we got a few provisions.
Serifos was the plan next day. We motored into a head-wind and anchored most of the day in a deserted bay called Ormos Koutala. The hills are pock marked with iron workings and there are a few ruins of the industry but no current activity. While we were anchored in the bay, a youngish man on two crutches drove up to one end of the bay, painfully and very slowly worked himself the whole length of the pebble beach (about 1Km), stripped off and crawled into the sea for a swim. He must have had something like Muscular Distrophy as his legs were able to do very little. It was an amazing display of courage and determination! Very humbling.
From Serifos, we motored, sailed, then motored again to a tiny port called Loutra for supplies. Hardly anybody spoke English (it really isn’t a tourist island) so my rudimentary Greek was very useful. We were made very warmly welcome – particularly in the first Taverna as you leave the port and at a small but very efficient supermarket up the hill. After lunch we made what we expected to be a short hop round the top of the island to Ormos Kolona where there is a wild beach with a hot spring on it. In the event, we found ourselves motoring into the teeth of a force 7 with heavy seas and were very glad to get there after 3 hours. It was more crowded than we hoped – a French live-aboard and a Swiss Charter were aleady there. The anchorage is not big so we were forced to anchor closer to rocks than I was comfortable with. We got away with it as the wind stayed steady. I really should have put out a kedge.


The spring was already full when we got there so we went over at dawn before anyone else was up and had a wonderful open-air hot bath. Thoroughly recommended! We were on the water by 7.00 and sailed almost all of the way to Poros on the Peloponnese. The wind got up to 25 Knots a few times with heavy beam-seas which wasn’t comfortable.


There were ships everywhere too. When it looked as if the wind hat set solidly into the 20s, we put in a reef – whereupon of course, it immediately dropped to 12 knots and then died over the next hour.





Almost at Poros, we went right by a Turtle. It didn’t dive and looked as if one flipper wasn’t working properly – looked as if it might have been injured – poor thing. We wrote up Poros on the way out so I won’t repeat myself here.