Week 5: Trizonia to Poros (111nm)

Our overall journey, barring one big day, has slowed right down – we took our time this week. That meant spending more days in fewer places and was a fun change of pace. But the real highlight was our experience transiting the Corinth Canal, which was both awe-inspiring and (just a tad) nail-biting! The other key goal we had for the week was to find a good spot to leave the boat while we are away in the UK next week, which we were pleased to hit on the first try.

We left the strange boat graveyard of Trizonia on Saturday and headed east to Galaxidi. It was a really lively place, with a pretty town quay where our group and a number of other liveaboards all congregated. We enjoyed a couple of days here chatting with our neighbours and generally enjoying the great spot. We particularly enjoyed the company of our friends Don and Cindy on Ice Bear (from Canada). They were first and foremost great company, and then to top it off had a 3D printer and kindly gave us some parts they’d made, and also shared a bunch of movies from their hard drives. Truly lovely people :). Plus, Alec found a free acapella concert nearby, which was put on by a travelling Polish group (go figure?), which we greatly enjoyed alongside a couple of delightful local beers (a weiss beer style, called Delphi).

The Corinth Canal

We were keen to get to the canal on Monday, since it is closed on Tuesdays. Plus, the forecast was finally for wind! Lots of wind, 25+ kts to be exact. This would actually normally be a bit more than we’d like to sail in, but as it was to be right behind us it would feel much calmer and we would be able to really fly. So off we went, and with only half of our genoa out stormed along at 7-8kts (normally we’d be delighted to make 6!), and covered the c.30nm to the canal by lunchtime.

As we approached, I had to hail the canal control tower on our VHF to request passage. They check your boat details to ensure that you will fit and, for big ships, to organise little pilot boats to help navigate. I would love to go back at some point and watch them bring one of those big boats through because it is ludicrously narrow. They say its 25m wide, but I’m not sure I buy that. It felt about 15! Anyway, the control was very organised, and we only had to wait about 20 minutes before they hailed me back and gave us the go ahead.

There is a hydraulic road bridge at each end of the canal, and the one at our end opened just wide enough and long enough to let us through (it literally started closing again as we were passing through it). Once inside, the walls slowly rose around us, and it felt like a bit like we’d walked back in time. The Corinth canal first opened in 1893, after being attempted and abandoned by a number of previous emperors before it was finally finished by I believe a French company? It has very high walls (c.60m) of solid rock, which we learned apparently need constant maintenance as they are fairly crumbly. This was evident as we passed along, with random lumps of stone along the edges and a number of spots where things had clearly been patched with a bit of concrete. It felt as old as it is, and you could even in some spots see the remnants of a little path along the side, where they used to walk and pull ships through by hand before they had engines.

The water was a bright, Caribbean turquoise and because of the high walls it was very quiet. So we cracked a beer and enjoyed taking in the sight of it as we travelled its c.3 mile length. Alec even got a wave from some pedestrians on one of the bridges that pass over! We shortly made it to the other side and then dutifully pulled over to pay the toll. Alec very cleverly made this time lapse video with our GoPro, so you can get the full experience!

Now on the other side, we’d made it to the Saronic! We anchored for the night in a little bay called Korfos, and then the next morning headed for Megalochori on Agistri. It’s a small island with a really well-protected harbour that we wanted to scout as a potentially good spot to leave the boat during our time in the UK. We were delighted to find a lovely town, some really nice cafes, and even better a place that would be perfect to leave the boat. Our friends Jan and Lynn on their yacht Nemesis even turned up as well!

We stayed a couple of days, and as the sun was going down on the second, watched a steady stream of boats continue to come in looking for a place to moor. All but the very last comer had either managed to squeeze in or decided to head elsewhere. This last boat was clearly not willing to head back out or to anchor off for the night though, so they spent half an hour trying to wedge in to various places. With no luck, eventually they headed for us and asked if they could raft alongside. We weren’t terribly keen, but would have hated to be in that situation ourselves, so said okay.

Our new neighbors were a group of people who’d come from Israel with a skipper to learn to sail. Certainly not the usual sailing crowd! They were nice, although we found it odd that they didn’t put many mooring lines out to secure themselves to us and the pontoon. As there was no wind, we didn’t feel the need to ask them to put more, though would kick ourselves for that later…

We’ve started to become very attuned to changes in the weather, and both Alec and I woke up about 4am when the wind picked up. It was blowing in a direction that meant our lines were holding the weight of both our boat and our neighbour’s, as they hadn’t rigged lines to the jetty as one should when rafted. It continued to strengthen, so eventually I went out and rigged their missing lines to take the stress off our boat. As I was nearly finished, their skipper came on deck looking very confused. She didn’t seem very convinced by my explanation of what I was doing, but we left it and all went back to bed (Alec and I feeling much better).

The next morning we decided that perhaps our neighbors’ skipper didn’t have much experience of rafting, given the confusion of the night before. This was later confirmed when they tried to leave. This should have been a pretty simple procedure of casting lines and reversing out, but somehow they managed to hook our life buoy with their anchor and bent its mount. While annoying, it was easy enough to bend the thing back, and we were just happy it hadn’t been anything more substantial! About 15 minutes later we were surprised to see the Israelis come back to give us €30 in apologies for bending our buoy mount. So we decided they were okay in the end!

We had a few more days free before our trip back to the UK, so decided to head down to Poros. It’s a buzzing island a bit further south, with a big town and lots of nice nearby anchorages. For better or worse, this brought to a head something I’ve been struggling with really ever since we moved onto the boat. I don’t know if it’s the size of the boat, or I feel greater pressure since the boat is ours, or what, but I’ve really lost my confidence with mooring. Ideally, with just the two of us on board, I would helm for mooring so that Alec can do the jobs that require more oomph. But the last few times I’ve tried it on town quays I’ve panicked and Alec has had to take over the helm. Anchoring is the easiest moor, and I’d still been managing to helm these, but when we made it to Poros even that I found too much. I think certainly part of the challenge for me is that I am for the most part a real perfectionist, which really clashes with sailing. It’s not like a car, you can’t just point the boat and have it necessarily go straight. Particularly in reverse, the boat tends to slew slightly one way or the other (due to prop walk – which is a both annoying and sometimes helpful property of propellers when they run in reverse). Plus depending on what the wind is doing you can be blown off course pretty easily as well. And there aren’t really brakes, per se. It’s an art to compensate for all these factors, and every situation is different. You can’t just learn the procedure the way you can with say a parallel park in a car. Every time you moor you have to assess the conditions and figure out the best way of tackling them. I like rules and procedures, so this doesn’t come naturally to me.

A few tears later I was resolved to at least take one step forwards again, and we decided that the following morning we’d take a couple of hours so that I could practice helming for anchoring. We did a bit of manoeuvring as well, so that I could start to get a better feel for the boat and also rebuild some confidence in driving the boat in close quarters. We then anchored three times, with me helming. I definitely felt myself getting a bit more comfortable again by the end, although fate definitely did its best to make the testing conditions more difficult! As we were pulling up the anchor from my second attempt, Alec discovered we’d managed to pick up a concrete block (which had ropes set in it) as well. This had got tangled on the anchor and it took all of Alec’s might to haul it off long enough for me to cut the ropes and free it. Sadly this incident saw the end of our boat hook (basically, a hook on a stick that is helpful in many boating situations), which broke when Alec subsequently used it to try to untwist the anchor attachment where the concrete block had fouled it. But we got there in the end! Though a bit shaken, my third try went reasonably well and I definitely feel I’ve made some forward progress in helming, at least for anchoring. I think, ultimately, driving a big boat is hard, and I just need to recognise that I will get it wrong as much as I get it right for a while until I’ve had a heck of a lot more practice!

Once safely anchored (again), we spent a lovely afternoon exploring the winding streets of Poros, chilling at a café, and also replacing our broken boat hook :), before heading back to Serenity for an early night’s sleep.