26/07/09 – Saronic Islands – Aegina to Vathy
We woke up relatively early (considering we were on holiday anyway) after our first night’s sleep onboard and headed off for a swim at the beach around the corner from the marina. Needing to conserve fresh water on board, a quick dip in the sea and then brief shower to get rid of the remaining salt is the best option for keeping clean. It also has the fringe benefit of helping to work up an appetite so that we can fully enjoy breakfast on board. We were happy to find out that Nathalie’s lost luggage was due to arrive on the ferry arriving at 09:00 (although she may have been less happy to have been given the good news at 01:00 in the morning!) so we could make a relatively early start and see if we could get to grips with this sailing thing!
We headed out of the marina with no particular destination in mind to do a couple of man over board exercises (quite important to get that out of the way before there is any potential for anyone to actually fall over board!) and generally get the hang of being on board a boat again. As you can see by my confused expression, this was also necessary before we attempted to do any proper sailing!
Once our exercises were out of the way, we headed off for a bit of a sail to Kyra Nisida where we chose a
nice little bay to stop off and have lunch in. After lunch we had a discussion on what to do and where to go next, and John our instructor recommended Vathy as being quite nice and also somewhere we had not been before (my mother, sister and I had sailed around this area the year before as well). Since the prevailing winds were northerly (force 4 or so since you asked), this made for quite a quick trip down to the small port town which is on the Methana peninsula.
The little marina was very pretty, but unfortunately quite small and crowded by the time we got there. That gave us some instant practice in mooring bows-to against two other boats that were already there. I think we took them a bit off-guard but after their initial misgivings (read: curses and rants) we all seemed to get along just fine – which was convenient since the only way for us to get off our boat was via theirs!
As we usually do on these trips, we headed ashore for dinner. John recommended a taverna a little off the marina area, as these are normally better food as well as less crowded and generally cheaper. The taverna itself was lovely, and we had a table right on the sea (quite literally if you check the photos below!) however, as the waiter kept on informing us, they were having a very bad day. We’re not sure exactly what that means, or why they were having a bad day, but the result was that there was very little choice on the menu and what we did get was not amazingly good. Just to round off their ‘bad day’ the entire peninsula lost power towards the end of our dinner – good job I’d brought a torch!
Regardless of their ‘bad day’ we still had a nice meal and relaxed after the first day on the boat. We headed back to the boat after dinner, looking forward to more of the same the next day – but I’ll let Becky tell that part of the story.
For all the photos of our trip, checkout our photo album by clicking here.
For the scrapbook entry showing the route of where we travelled, click here.
To view all of our Summer Holiday 2009 posts, click here.