Lefkas is an Island but is only classed as on because the bridge that attaches it to the mainland is a lifting bridge. Seemingly they chose to have the lifting bridge as opposed to a fixed bridge so as to get grants from the EU for being an Island.
Anyway, the bridge “lifts” on the hour so you need to make sure you are there just before the bridge lifts to allow you through the canal on up to Lefkas otherwise you will have an hour to kick about till the next lifting and there is nowhere to tie up to. It must cause some amount of hassel for motorists as you can see from the queue of cars which builds up very quickly to allow boats to transit the canal.
We passed Lefkas marina and thought about going in to see if the man who first owned Camira still had his boat there, but we thought if he did he probably wouldn’t be there in high season when it’s so so hot.
Our stop for the night was Nikiana. This isnn’t our first time to Nikiana, we were here on holiday in 1998 on the Sunsail Gallini Flotilla with our friend Iain. Once again this part of our trip brought back so many great memories,……. Liz and Joe who now have their own boat in Largs, the six Essex boys that I had said to Gordon and Iain were going to be a nightmare and very loud but actually turned out to be fantastic fun, dancing and partying till four in the morning….Aahh, those were the days.
Anyway, I digress, the town has changed so much, it’s much bigger and quite busy, when we were here it was a really small place and very quiet, I suppose though, it was 18 years ago and things change. The one area which was exactly the same was the harbour. I still remember the nerves I felt when being shown our boat for the week, it was a 30ft Durour and everything in it seemed so alien to me, plus it was blowing an absolute hoolie that night, so much so that the Sunsail crew asked if anyone would prefer to go back to the hotel for that night, which I don’t think anyone did. Sorry, I digress again.
When we moored up we thought we got the last space on the end of the harbour, however a yacht run by a company who do Skippered day sails came in and basically moored up on the corner of the harbour wall where the only thing for him to tie onto was the lamppost, well seen it wasn’t his yacht. We tried to get a taxi that night for a trip into Nidri but to no avail so we ate in the taverna just up from the harbour and had an early night.
