Eastern Sporades Bound

We stayed a further few days in Porto Koufo.

We much preferred the southern end. The water was far clearer for swimming. Another boat with a seldom seen Israeli flag had nicked our mooring buoy anyway, how dare they.

Next on our loose plan was to visit Thasos via the northern coast of Greece beyond the Akti Peninsula. However the Meltemi prevailing wind blows from the NE up here before swinging to the NW further south. That could mean a bash into it. There are also warnings of very big and dangerous seas off Akti and especially near Mount Athos. So we would need to see what the weather had in store for us.

The other option would be to head off the wind a bit to Limnos and maybe then jump up to Thasos?

We decided on the latter. It’s roughly 55 miles to Mirina on Limnos so an early start was planned, up at 03:00 and we managed to get away for 03:20, not bad!

Mount Athos in the dawn

The forecast had been NE 9-15 knots at first then dropping to 5 knots later.

As it turned out it was initially a wee bit stronger than forecast and we hit big seas (as warned) off the tip of Akti. We considered turning back but with a falling forecast we just battled it out.

Just for a change the weather played ball and as forecast it calmed down a bit in the afternoon.

About half way across we were surrounded with tuna hunting and jumping out of the water around the boat for 3 hours. Seagulls were picking off the small fish the tuna didn’t catch.

I tried my very expensive lure that I had bought, secretly, in Mytilini and no sooner had it hit the water I was into a big fish! My rod is a thick boat rod I used for sea fishing off of Largs when you could get big cod. I managed to get the fish to within a boats length away when the line gave way! We were really looking forward to fresh tuna. We tried again and lost another lure ……that was us out of lures so no more fishing until we can restock.

The one that got away

We arrived in Mirina just before 19:00 and anchored off the beach. Wolfgang & Renate were on the harbour quay and warned us off an expected storm the next day, maybe better to come in, but we decided to stay in the bay to let Lilly wander the boat and not have to lock her in (if we went stern too) after her long passage. We were underway for almost 15 plus hours with more than half of that sailing and the rest motor sailing so not too bad.