Sunday 2^nd August – Port Kastos, Nísos Kastos – Port Vathi, Meganisi

38:39.912N 20:46.873E

We enjoyed a quiet night with the only disturbance being a very noisy mossie at 3am that I couldn’t find each time I put the light on.  At last I got him but he was instantly replaced by another.  I’ve been a bit complacent recently and have not been using the nets as they have not been bothering us.  The nets will have to be reinstated.

After breakfast we went for a walk around the village.  On this tiny island that took only a short time but was still significantly hilly.  The houses were character houses rather than tourist villas and the village was very picturesque.  Richard had earlier done a bread run to the small mini-market.

Late morning we shipped anchor and motored across to the tail of Meganisi – it was another very hazy day with no wind.  We went past the caves on the south west coast to Papa Nicolis’ cave which is quite large and where it is reputed that the Greeks hid a submarine during the war.  Unfortunately the water was too deep to anchor and, as we arrived, a swarm of other yachts turned up from out of nowhere so we decided to move on and find somewhere for lunch.  Looking at the cave the submarine would have to have been pretty small.

We found a bay on the north coast of Meganisi and went in to drop the anchor.  There were two boats already there and one was the sturdy wooden Swiss yacht that we had seen in One House Bay the day before.  We said hello and anchored beside them; when we swam the anchor we realised that our anchors were set side by side in the sand but as we were only there for lunch we thought we’d be fine, and we were.  Whilst we were there more yachts arrived – it seems that yachts home in on other yachts here.

After lunch we moved on round to Spartakhori; Richard had wanted to go back here as we had had an aborted attempt to visit many years ago when we had sailed over from Lefkas whilst on a Sunsail holiday.  Unfortunately he had slipped on deck and had dislocated a finger as we were approaching the berth and we ended up being rushed back to the hospital on Lefkas.

Today there was no room at the inn so we went on round to Port Vathi, about 2 miles away and found a lovely berth on a quay that is being set up as a marina and has all the relevant boxes for electricity and water but none of it working.  The view from the cockpit is great.

It was a lovely afternoon but was ruined when early evening a large number of charter boats arrived.  A couple of the boats, very aggressive party boats, tried to berth in spaces that didn’t exist.  One, larger than Pyxis started to come stern to trying to get into the 2 foot gap between Pyxis and the yacht next door.  Loosely interpreted, I told him that, with the greatest respect, he would not fit and he should consider going somewhere else. 

It got a bit stressful but he eventually went elsewhere – unfortunately he is now at right angles to us and probably moored across our anchor, and all our neighbours, as are the next half dozen boats that arrived.  These boats arrived just before dusk and simply expected the rest of us to stop whatever we were doing and move somewhere else so that they could park.

As you can tell, Greece is not living up to expectations.  My Greek Island Hopping book bought for me by my colleagues when I left two years ago is not speaking highly of many of the places that we are visiting and I am tending to agree.  Still, it is high season so I’m perhaps being a bit unfair.  Maybe we just need to get out of sync with the flotillas.

We walked around town tonight and the town is absolutely lovely – just too many charter boats around making a sleepy little town into a tourist nightmare.