Towards The Gulf of Volos
Gillyb
Sun 10 Jul 2011 09:03
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Position: 39:09.51N 23:11.78E
Hi Everyone - Yassoos (not sure if that is correct
spelling!)
We last hailed you from the little harbour in Limni
where we stayed four nights watching the boats come and go, swimming off the
beach and shopping in the little town. We continued northward and stopped
one night in a slightly bigger place called Loutra Adhipso. This was off
the beaten track so we were the only visiting yacht there. We are
just in front of the pleasure boat on the wall. The town has several
lovely hotels which in their time were attractive to all sorts of millionaires
and royalty who liked to come and stay as it is a sort of spa place.
The main hotel that we passed on the way in was designed by a famous German
architect and resembles an Austrian castle - a chap we spoke to told us about
its history and said you used to have to wear a 'tuxedo' just to dine in the
restaurant. Now it is still a holiday place for ancient
greeks! (We went swimming on the beach and felt right at
home!)
There were quite a lot of fisherman here and
several of them caught octopus and the next photo shows a fisherman in orange
trousers bashing a dead octopus - we have seen it before and it goes on for
half an hour at least. As Graham says - anything you have to bash
for half an hour just to tenderise cannot be worth eating! (You then have
to hang it in the sun for 3 days and BBQ it) We have not ever
been tempted to try it but they seem to love them.
There is also a photo of our water carrier - Graham
on one of our bikes. You may notice in the pic that there is a
blue electric/water tower or box beside the boat? We have come
across these all over Greece and most of them are not connected to anything and
do not work. Seems they started doing up all these little harbours
then ran out of E. U.money! So now they will never work! So
both in Limni and here we just took the water cans to the tap that is usually
round near the fishermen and topped up our tanks on the boat.
The next harbour was called Orei - see photo of
sunset with our boat on the wall. There were several boats here and
they did have blue towers which worked - well some of them did! We
managed to get water and electrics for two nights here for a charge of about 20
Euros altogether. All of these harbours are still on the long narrow
island of Evia forming the channel between it and Greece. Also in
Orei was the bull! We went looking for this but missed it initially
as the pilot book gave no idea of its size but we eventually found it not 50
yards from the end of the wall at the edge of the square. It is a
full size marble beast - dredged up by fishermen in 1965 (bet they had to mend
some nets afterwards). It is described as a Hellenic grave piece 2,500
years old! It is now enclosed in a window framed box and still looks
magnificent.
The next bit of the journey took us up into the
Gulf of Volos,which is a large gulf with many smaller bays. We were
here in 1996 because Duncan worked for sunsail at a place called Leda.
Leda is no longer a sunsail base but we went along the coast looking for it
and recognised the apartments and small beach. I took lots of photos
so Duncan can confirm it later. We carried on past Milina and past the
current sunsail base which is just lots of cruisers (Leda used to be residential
with dinghies and wind surfers from the little beach and about five
cruisers). We stopped in Vathoudi Bay and anchored among the many
moored yachts and have spent the weekend here quietly reading, swimming
etc. (See photo of bay - our yacht in the middle and moody pic of
sunset)
We have spoken to the sunsail boys and Friday was
change over day so they are quieter now and we can go on their pontoon and get
water. We plan to do our last bit of shopping in Milina and top up
with water as we are going over to Skiathos to pick up Lynette & Steve
on Friday and there is more difficulty getting water on the small islands of the
Northern Sporades. We will have to resort to our water carrier
again!
Bye for Now
GillyB
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