30 July 2013, Towards Zakynthos!

A pretty early start 8.30 with breakfast onboard while motoring south through the mirror like sea. A real magical feeling when the sea is like that! A couple of hours later, outside Ithaka, we discovered a big turtle swimming just 20 m from the boat. I’m sure it was not as exited with pleasure as we were circling around it on a respectable distance, so after few camera shots we quickly left it alone.  Half an hour later we enjoyed a quick swim in the middle of the sea with 320m depth, still dead calm. Extremely blue water and 27,7 C in water temperature. It is always a special feeling swimming out in the sea far,far away from land. The film “Jaws” always comes into mind J Although the white shark is present in the Mediterranean it is 35 years ago anyone was attached, I have read. Anchoring outside sandy beach at the very south peak of Kephalonia we enjoyed a lunch onboard and a few swims. Some noisy speed boats with dragging tires/people found pleasure in use our boat as a rounding bouy. We did not.

The afternoon wind started to increase so we left with sails heading Zakynthos. Two reefs on the main were appropriate in the wind which at times reached 15 m/s, and we were heading towards it. Not so nice, but with 8-9 knots speed we reached the lovely harbor San Nicholas on the north tip of Zakynthos in just 1,5 hours. No-one got sea sick, amazingly, but the waves hadn’t built up yet.

Although the strong wind we managed to more without incidents, but the anchor was not holding much. But the wind came from land so it did not matter.

We had a special very charming restaurant “La Storia” in mind. It is lying directly on the sandy beach and is embraced with a lightbulb populated rope, very cozy. We had a corner table directly at the water front and ordered barbequed sea bream. Really tasty! The Rod Heikel guide had warned us for having one of his worst meals ever in one of the restaurants here. But as last year, we were very pleased with the food here!

The evening ended, as usual, with three ouzos at a nice bar (more or less the only bar here) which was newly opened last year and we visited it on the boys sailing trip. I help the owners establishing a Facebook check-in place for their Regatta Bar

. We really liked this bar, pleasant atmosphere and really good cool music. As it was last year as well.

The wind increased a lot during night and was probably exceeding 20m/s. It felt good to be safely moored at the quay.