One of the benefits of teaching people to sail is that sometimes they go off and buy a boat and ask me to help them with it! My friends Will and Tess bought this really nice new Hanse 415 sailboat in Greece. They wanted to continue their ASA training and get help learning the ropes on this new yacht. The yacht was located in Lavrion harbor near Athens and so I flew there and met them. The plan was to sail around the Greek islands and end up in Paros, where they want to keep it, and see as much of the Greek islands we had time for. The weather pattern had other plans so we did a pass through the Saronic islands through the Corinth Canal, into and out of the Ionian Sea and back through the Saronic islands before returning to where we started.
The thing about sailing in the Med though is that it’s pretty seasonal. I flew there in March, which was the early beginning of the sailing season and so it was windy and cold the first few days. We started our trip in windy cold conditions but it cleared up and in two weeks we were able to visit: Aegina in the Saronic islands before heading west to through the Corinth Canal and into the Ionian Sea to Kefalonia and Lefkas, back through the Cornith Canal to Poros island and Hydra island before returning to Lavrion.
So early in the season like this it was really awesome that everything was open, but not crowded. Most of the ports we visited we were the first boat there and had our pick of places to moor. By the time we got to Hydra it was starting to get a little more crowded, but just the right amount of other boats to make it interesting. No tangled anchors, just cool neighbors to meet!
The best part of this sailing trip, as all good trips is the people you enjoy it with. Will and Tess are awesome and my buddy James who did two Pacific Offshore Challenge trips with us in Hawaii, flew over from the UK and joined us in Kefalonia.
