The weather forecast was for the day starting with light winds, building in the late morning/early afternoon and then dropping out overnight. We decided that, as it was a usable wind angle, we should use this opportunity to start into the Cyclades Islands and try to work our way east toward Turkey (or Türkiye as they now prefer apparently). Today was the chance to hop to Seriphos (one of the many different spellings) Island, one of the lesser visited Cyclades Islands and we had heard some good stuff about its main harbour so decided to check it out.
The passage was about 65 miles (around 130 km) and we knew it was going to be a long day …. it turned out to be just a shade under 12 hours in total by the time we had the anchor down and the first beer opened. ⚓️🍺
The plan was to start early and use the building breeze. We left the anchorage just as dawn was breaking at 5:15am and we finally had our anchor down and secure at 5pm.
We started off with 1 or 2 knots of breeze and we had to motor for a good 3 hours or more before the breeze suddenly developed within the space of about 10 minutes (no gradual building of breeze here). The wind increased in strength and dropped again several times throughout the day and oscillated between a generally friendly angle and an almost obstinately unhelpful angle, and generally kept us guessing as to what the heck was going on. But it wasn’t until we arrived at the southwest corner of Serifos Island that we watched the yacht in front of us tack through about 140 degrees without changing their course. Then we experienced it for ourselves. Very bizarre!
The passage today was at times enjoyable, confusing, good, bad, tricky, disappointing, uplifting and challenging, but most of all it was long (how did we ever survive the 8 days passages to the pacific islands? 🫣🥴). And to top it off there were no dolphins, whales or warships. But the main thing is we got here safely ….. although it did take us 3 attempts to get the anchor to dig in and hold ….. good thing we rebuilt the anchor winch.
Next stop: Serifos Chora (or Hora, which means old town).
Share this post