Sailing Aglaya

In the meantime, we are ready to cast off. The repairs are done. Our bicycles are stowed in the foreship again. Food and water are stored. Since we also repaired the electrics of our anchor winch with expert help and had to order parts for it, everything took a while.

Last Monday we wanted to set off in the direction of Corfu, but the storm "Daniel" threw a spanner in the works. The wind was already too strong to go out of the berth without a damage. Now we have rain and wind with over 30 knots. However, it doesn't hit us as hard as it does the people in the region around Volos and Larissa. We are glad that we haven't set off yet, have secured our boat well and just have to be patient. In Messolonghi this is easy to bear.

Now we are back on board. Soon we will start again. First in the Ionian Islands north towards Corfu. There will be visitors on board. We will report.

Our new sun sail we have supplemented at home with two additional cloths. And we brought another new acquisition: small walky-talkies, so that we don't have to yell at each other anymore when we drop anchor and when we moor and cast off. 🙂

But there is always something to fix. Our electric on-board toilet no longer works. So we have to remove it. This is what our construction site in the foreship looks like at the moment. One of the two pumps is broken.

In the marina it is very quiet at the moment. There are not many people on their boats. And there are hardly any sailors passing through the marina. Messolonghi is too far away from the usual routes. And the marina bar is closed for a week.

We visit our friends Pat and Tony, whom we met here as sailors. We got to know them nearly four years ago. They sold their boat and now live in an olive grove in the hills just outside Messolonghi in a house that they have fixed up very nicely.

Aglaya stays in Messolonghi and we go home for July and August.

Probably our boat would have found its way from the idyllic Petalas Bay, where we anchored for two nights, to Messolonghi even without us. After all, this has been Aglaya's home port for many years. After almost two years we are now returning there, first around the bizarre island of Oxia into the Gulf of Patras, then along the flat alluvium and the lagoons and finally into the channel of Messolonghi. It is also a special feeling for us to enter here again. Who is still there from those we know? And how are the other sailors from our circle of acquaintances? What have they experienced? And of course: Is it still as nice in the Sunset, the marina bar, as it was two years ago?

We receive a warm and cheerful welcome. Our friends Angela and Walter are there when we dock - by the way, on exactly the same spot where we were two years ago. Also the two murings still go into the water at a funny angle. Obviously nothing has changed and we have to try to moor our boat as secure as possible. After all, we want to leave it alone here for almost two months.

In the evening, six of us sit in the Sunset and all talk about our experiences. A nice reunion! Not only Aglaya feels at home here, we do too.

Before we start our journey home on June 29th, there is still a lot to do: Clean the boat, tidy up, do laundry, take good care of everything on board and find someone who can fix our electric on-board toilet, prepare the summer cover. But we also unpacked our bikes again. Maybe we will manage to make a trip to the Gulf before we leave.

Opposite the Ionian islands of Kefallonia and Ithaca, on the southern part of the western Greek mainland coast, a peculiar landscape begins, just before the entrance to the Gulf of Patras. It does not correspond at all to the cliché of the lovely Greek islands or the Mediterranean landscape at all. In the background, high barren karst mountains, in front of them, towards the sea, huge alluvial plains of the rivers Acheloos and Evinos. These are very fertile plains, wine, olives, vegetables, fruits are intensively cultivated here - in former times also cotton, by the way. Between the plains and the sea stretches a huge lagoon landscape, inhabited only by a few fishermen in corrugated iron huts. The small huts stand directly on the water, and some of their inhabitants move around only by boat. Land and sea can hardly be distinguished here from a distance. 

The lagoon landscape is partly under nature protection, flamingos, pelicans and many rare animal species live here. The brackish water is sometimes only a few centimeters deep. Therefore, further east in Messolonghi (Italian: Mezza Laguna), salt is extracted on a large scale in huge shallow water basins, the best in Greece. 

Already in ancient times the area was densely populated and prosperous, ships and soldiers for the Trojan War were provided here, you can still visit an ancient shipyard in Oinadeon. Above Messolonghi the ancient city of Plevrona with 20.000 inhabitants at that time is excavated. 

Cultural and natural landscape, land and sea flow impressively into each other here.

We sail between the Ionian Islands (Kefallonia, Ithaca, Zakynthos and many smaller ones) and the Greek mainland. Some of the islands have high mountains, the smaller ones are cone-shaped, almost all of them are green. 

We move like on a huge alpine lake, everywhere you look, mountains. There are many small cozy and sheltered anchorages and bays between the islands and the mainland, but also harbors like Astakos opposite Ithaka or Poros on Kefallonia.   The distances between the many possible places are not particularly large, sometimes less than 10 miles, so you don't have to leave so early in the morning and in the evening you can still find a place in the harbor or in a bay to anchor. And the taverns in the harbors leave nothing to be desired - and fish to cook or fry yourself is also available directly from the fisherman.

A wonderful (water) landscape, relaxed sailing, and finally the summer is here - what more could you want?

And here the view from our anchorage at Astakos

in the evening

We had already suspected that the high pressure over Central Europe, which was stable for several weeks, caused all lows to pass it and move into the Mediterranean area. Unstable, rather cool weather with lots of rain and thunderstorms - that is rather unusual in May and June in Greece. So we hadn't packed away our warm clothes yet.

And now we know it for sure: The Omega weather system has given us this bad weather phase: in Central Europe a steady high pressure system and in the West and East low pressure areas. Normally, the weather systems relevant for Greece move from northwest to southeast. The high over Central Europe blocked this movement. So we noticed that the temperatures at home in Germany were often higher than here in the Peloponnese and the Ionian Sea. And our friends at home already envied us for the rain, because it was much too dry at their place. Most recently, we spent three particularly uncomfortable days on Ithaca in Vathy: continuous rain with thunderstorms and strong winds. Most of the time we were guarding our boat.  

And why Omega? The flow field around the two lows and the high look like the Greek capital letter Ω on the weather map. 

Meanwhile, the weather map looks different. The omega has disappeared. We could sail to the mainland to Astakos with sun and great sailing wind. Now it is getting warmer every day, so we unpack our sun sail more and more often.