Poros - Corinth Canal - Trizonia

Leaving Poros 

Usually a lighter person does this..

Well, it has been a little quiet on the blogging front, but busy on the water. Since I last wrote,  I spent a week in Poros while Catherine went to  play a concert. My entertainment was the almost daily debacle of anchors being fouled and the local diver being called, something I managed to escape, miraculously .  The only, it seems, local diver was on speed dial and I saw him cash in €80 numerous times, sometimes even in one morning. Aside from this I had a few maintenance tasks to complete (some invented I admit),  although not many really as everything is still in good shape.  When Catherine got back we escaped the stifling heat of Poros and made our way to a lovely anchorage just a five hour sail away off the small island of Angistri. This lies just next to Aegina, which we visited some years back and my ears are still ringing from the memory of the discos in the harbour.

Angistri 

Entrance to the Canal

Angistri in contrast is idyllic and we spent two days at anchor enjoying the noticeably warmer pristine water. I didn't quite believe the water temperature gauge on the instruments so I pedantically got my multimeter out and set about calibrating the reading only to find that it was in fact correct at 28 degrees.  This, being the wimp that I am, is the perfect temperature for me.  This part of the Saronic is so protected in comparison with Cyclades that it feels like an inland waterway. Unfortunately superyachts seem to find this compelling too and our disdain is evidently not felt strongly enough to ward them off. There is something blissful about being at anchor and totally self sufficient for a number of days - this presumes of course that you have made the right provisioning decisions, which I am pleased to say we had.

On Wednesday we sailed toward Isthmia, which is at the eastern entrance to the Corinth canal. Everyone says it is an experience to go through the canal and it really is. Traffic is only allowed one way at a time and the management by the control tower is punctuated by fraught radio messages to skippers not paying attention.

Clearance deceives

No turning back...

When it is very busy the wait can be hours apparently, but we moored up along side the office, paid  the exorbitant fee, and a couple of minutes later the submersible bridge at the entrance was lowered and we were told to proceed. The limestone walls are almost vertical and for three and half nautical miles you are in an eerie engineering relic that serves no commercial purpose other than taking tourists through, being too narrow for commercial shipping. Usually there is a convoy  but we were alone save for a superyacht some distance behind us.

Gulf of Corinth

Once in the Gulf of Corinth we were greeted by a flat sea and mountainous landscape. The coastline is quite underdeveloped and we found a remote anchorage not seeing another yacht just about the whole afternoon.  The Gulf of Corinth and then Patras stretches less than 100 miles until it opens to the Ionian, but it has its own weather pattern and fierce winds seem to drive eastward when you're headed West and vice versa. We decided to visit a town whose name, Galaxidi, seemed to ring a bell and when we got there we realised that we  had stopped by there on a road trip nearly ten years ago on our way to Delphi, which is only 20 minutes away.

Galaxidi

The town is charming and shows no signs of any reduction in the standard of living that locals seem to continually want to point out. When they see foreign flagged boats they invariably say,  ah, you have a better standard or living, to which I say, yes,  but you have a better standard of sunshine. A brief  conversation with neighbouring yachites to compare notes on the weather confirmed a strong westerly coming in for a few days so we headed out to a sensible midway point in the gulf being a tiny island called Trizonia.

28kts on the nose

As we got in the wind started howling and at first glance it didn't look like a place to spend a few days sheltering, but around the corner from the forlorn marina there is a picturesque waterfront with several tavernas and a beach. Some re-calculating confirmed that we will get to Corfu on time next week even if the wind blows against us for the next three days.  Fortunately there are pleasant walks here and lots of time for me to listen to Catherine practicing Berlioz Romeo & Juliet  for the Proms in a couple of weeks time, while the force 6 wind howls outside. The fridge is working brilliantly though, so my hydration plan is bang on schedule.

Trizonia

A dodgy insurance claim in Trizonia methinks