9 August 2013, To Corinth town and the end of the Gulf

The alarm was set to 06:00, it was dusk. No breakfast and we and the boat was prepared for departure withing 15 minutes. The evening before we had moved the boat to alongside the lighthouse quay. We were lucky to get up the anchor easily. So this morning it was just to let go of all the lines and glide away.

The sea was calm, almost mirrorlike and we could have breakfast listening to the sound of the boat engine. Outdoors at least.

We sailed along the cost southeast heading for Corinth. And we had started early to avoid the strong meltemi wind which we had suffered from the last two sailing days. After an hour we got wind, but not as strong as we had feared. We could sail closed reach with a easterly wind.  And no waves – just lovely! And sufficient boat speed towards our destination, 4-6 knots.

 After another hour we left the coastline and the wind suddenly turned 180 degrees to westerly and we got a comfortable beam reach. Out in the Gulf the wind behaved very strange, sometimes dropping completely and sometime turning 45 degrees in various directions.

During this lovely sailing day we had three encounters with dolphins at a distance. This has never happened to us before. At 11:00 the meltemi wind caught us up with its typical 10-12 m/s, but this time from the beam and we noticed a speed record for the boat at this vacation, we were sailing for two hours with speeds always between 8-9 knots, with a maximum of 9,3 knots at several occasions.

Entering the Corint harbour a guy on the quay was waving us in for a alongside mooring which went well without incidents in spite of the strong winds. The guy was some kind of unofficial harbour master and on top of it, he was English, brought up in Plymouth but had been living in Greece for the last 45 years.

We went to restaurant Mediterranean of his recommendation for lunch and met him and another sailing couple there in their late sixties. We had a delicisous lunch and conversation. It is really nice to meet so many new acquaintances as you do when you sail

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The other couple, Klaus from Germany and Jennie from Oxford in England, were living in Greece and had sailed around in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean for many years. They had two houses with sea views above the little town Korfos on Peloponnesus and offered us to rent one of them. Korfos is one of the places we had planned to sail to anyway. They could recommend the bay there to be excellent for anchoring, well protected from the meltemi.

The unofficial harbor master Jonathan was a really nice character and had have a colourful life so far. He left England for Crete when he was 18 and made a living from fishing together with the Greeks there. So he did now as well in Corinth. He had also been sailing over the Atlantic in yachts four times, been working on trading ships and been everywhere in the world. For a while he lived as a hippie in Crete (Caves of Matala), in India (Goa) and of course he had experienced the famous Woodstock festival in USA 1969. And many, many more histories. We asked him to write a book about his life.