We said we wanted to sail less… - yet since we left mid May (18th) till August 12th when we arrived in Marina Zea in Athens we sailed 2’170 miles which is an improvement over what we used to do, yet still quite a lot of miles - how on earth did wemanaged to sail so much ? Well well well, I guess it comes from a number of factors including:

- Roberto is brilliant at doing advance planning and finding amazing things to see “on route”
- We often have friends who like sailing and do not mind having to sail a couple of hours every day
- We like discovering new and revisiting “old” places / villages / anchorages…

Yet, we are still hoping to allow ourselves to do less miles such as to be able to visit more things on each islands or place we go - yet for that we need to have decent temperatures and not the ones we had during our trip…. We were lucky to not have been affected -  except for one anchorage - by the horrible and dreadful fires that took place in different places in Greece because of these scorching temperatures.

On August 1st we welcomed our friends Danièle, Olivier with their 11 years old son Yann and with them we went to very beautiful places around the Peloponnese and its surrounding islands including :

- Kardamyli where we did a very nice walk in some gorgeous “gorges” that during this season were dry, allowing us to admire the rocks on each side of them
- Limeni where we visited the Diros Caves
- Poros in the evening - arriving from an anchorage with the dinghy by night, an experience that Yann liked very much
- Dokos where we did a very nice walk up the hill surrounded by goats and donkeys
- The amazing “Simos beach”
- Momenvasia - a must see village perched on rocks
- Ag. Anargynoi on Spetses were we visited a very deep cave that can only be accessed swimming and has a passage very tight to rocks before accessing a big cave with a sandy beach

We also passed the Southern Cape of Europe called Matapan.

Given that often we had to anchor with shorelines - by the end of our trip we (all of us, including Yann) became experts at it and did it in “almost” in record time…. !

We are now in Marina Zea were we - Roberto and I - are giving Knotty Girl a well deserved, and somewhat overdue, wash and clean session and doing some maintenance work, nothing new here… !