39:51.01N  25:13.70E

Friday 11^th June

We woke at 3 ready to leave at 4am.  Still dark so lifejackets on and still cool so warm clothes required.  Quite a tricky little channel to navigate our way out of the anchorage so much watching out for the sector lights to change colour while calling bearings from the hand bearing compass.  Here’s a picture of a yacht that got it wrong......

Needless to say we were all paying close attention to our allotted tasks.  Mike had planned the passage with extreme care and we got through without difficulty, put the sails up and set the course for Limnos just as the sun was rising behind us. 

The winds were fairly strong but variable so we changed the size of the sails repeatedly during the day, and it was just about at an angle that would take us all the way to Limnos without too much tacking or needing to use the engine.  It was fairly cool most of the time so we carried on wearing more layers than ‘Sailing in the Aegean’ would suggest.....

But it was a lovely day and a fabulous sail.  If we had left a day earlier or later we wouldn’t have had sufficient wind and would have needed to motor quite a lot of it so we were delighted.  The early start meant that sleeping was allowed and, for the first time ever on Tashi Delek, Mike left us to it for a couple of hours, went down to our cabin and went properly to sleep.  Fantastic dolphin sighting when they came close in to jump out of the water and play alongside us but we were in the middle of changing sails so couldn’t make the most of it or take any pictures.

Mike came up trumps again with bacon sandwiches at just the right moment. 

We made good time and arrived in the glorious anchorage of Ormos Mhoudrou.  The scenery on Limnos was completely different to other Islands we have visited to far.  Open hillsides and dry stone walls looked more like the wilds of Scotland than the Mediterranean.  Ormos Mhoudrou was the anchorage for all the ships preparing for Gallipoli and it was easy to picture.  For Mike it felt like the Falklands.

We spent the next couple of days hopping between anchorages and enjoying a swim.  Or not, in Mike’s case.

Always a few jobs to be done.  Taking advantage of having Sue on board we put her into one of the deep lockers at the back of the boat to retrieve a bolt that had dropped down.  There was no way Mike or I would have fitted.