30/07/09 – Saronic Islands – Poros to Ageistri/Drosousa
After the night sail that Becky mentioned in her previous post, we decided a lie-in was in order (we had after all got to bed well after 2!) so we didn’t surface until about 9ish. In keeping with our (new) tradition of running in Poros, we headed out for another run. Becky wanted to head a different route (a bit of variation I think) but I persuaded her that any other route would only be worse (ie more crowded, less breeze, less view, etc) so off we went. Today’s run was an interesting 3 min walk followed by 3 min light jog followed by 3 min fast jog, repeated 5 times. That all meant that we ended up going far further along the coast than last time, almost making it to Russian bay and the channel away from Poros! As a cool down we once again went for a swim in the sea, thoroughly enjoyable!
Once we’d had a leisurely breakfast (well brunch really, it was about midday!) we made ready to leave. We weren’t sure where we were headed, just basically north. Once out of the Poros channel past Russian bay we decided to head northwards in the general direction of Aegina. Since the winds were still northerly (force 5) we had some good practice sailing close to the wind and keeping the boat at some absurd angles – but still making good speed over the water. The one thing that we knew we wanted to do was to anchor out in a bay for the night, so we thought we would head over to Ageistri (Agistri/Angistri) as John reckoned there were some nice bays there that we could anchor in. Since it was already quite late, we decided to skip a lunch stop and head straight there instead so that we could get a nice afternoon and evening in the sun without having to worry about moving on.
Once around the south west corner of Ageistri we investigated a couple of possible bays, but ended up opting for the first bay we saw which coincidentally was where all the other boats were also anchored – there must be a reason for that! The bay looked out over the tiny island of Drosousa (or Dhoroussa, it seems that all of these islands have several different spellings!) and was sheltered from the winds and swell, which suited us very nicely.
John went ashore to connect a shore line for us, and after the second try our main anchor held. To add extra security (and as a good bit of training) we decided to drop a second kedge anchor to give us
additional hold. Unfortunately the sheet bend we’d tied to the trip line gave out as we were lowering the kedge, so we ended up needing to cross our fingers and hope that we’d be able to retrieve the kedge without the need for the trip (it was about 15m deep there, so I wasn’t going down without a tank). In our normal carefree style we decided to forget about the anchor and have a couple of drinks and a swim. We had a lovely meal of chicken and rice cooked onboard by my mother, and then a nice relaxing digestif watching the sun set until we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer. Off to bed in preparation for our last (unfortunately) day of sailing.
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.