Greek sail, summary

My family and I spent a week on a sailing boat chartered from Sail Ionian in Vliho on Lefkas. The boat was in excellent condition and everything worked, but I will make a point of ensuring that I can stand up in some part of the cabin of any boat I hire in the future. The attention and assistance from Di and Neil and the rest of their staff was matchless; nothing was too much trouble for them. They came out to help us at 9pm one evening and I heard other stories of their willingness to assist, including driving 15 miles in a rib to untangle an anchor chain. Very friendly too.

We spent the week largely circulating around Meganisi, returning frequently to the various coves and bays of its North coast for moorings, anchorages and swimming in the sun-warmed shallows. Sun-warmed shallows are desirable because, though it is not generally cold, the sea around the Ionian islands is mostly rather deep. After a week sailing these seas it was amusing to reflect that at any indicated depth less than 10 metres I was starting to get twitchy, since the bottom comes up rather quickly in many places, just like the land above the water, which is predominantly steeply rugged maquis. We also visited Kalamos and a couple of ports on Lefkas itself, as well as stopping to swim in the bay on the South side of Scorpios.

Food and drink were generally good, with some highlights (for me) including a white snapper at Stavros' in Vathi, greek salad almost everywhere we went and a mousaka in Porto Spiglia (in the bay beneath Spartakhori). The low point was the Dolphinia restaurant in Sivota where the lamb Kleftiko turned out to be a lamb stew with chips wrapped in foil - this was possibly due to the meal being taken during the Greece-Poland football match, so disabling all the men on the island.

We failed to see any dolphins, but the water was full of fish and crab life, as well as star-fish and octopi. The afternoon breeze was good for sailing most days, though we spent some afternoons just archored in a bay and swimming from the boat. Winds, when significant, were 10-20 knots with the notable exception of a storm on Tuesday afternoon which blew up to 28 knots (that I saw) and brought half an hour of torrential rain, which was almost the only rain we saw all week. Mostly the weather was hot and sunny with daytime temperatures up to 30 centigrade.

We took up sailing, a few years ago, with the idea that sailing holidays would be cheaper than skiing, only to both sail and ski for a couple of years. Now I think that although we still fancy skiing, the sailing holiday is a perfect alternative, working out slightly less expensive and more relaxing. Both holidays are made difficult by the need to fit around school holidays; this trip's cost was dominated by the air travel, rather than the boat charter - staying another week would almost have been cost-effective by offsetting the differential price of the air fares against another week of boat hire. I'm sure we'll do it all again soon.

Checking on Panoramio now I'm back home I find that I need not have taken a camera with me, since so many of the scenes I recorded are already available online. All I needed to do was to photograph my family in swimming attire and photshop them into the relevant images. Pride of place on my desk at the moment are two pictures from the holiday, both of the aircraft we flew out on, taken at Gatwick and Preveza respectively. In Greece the sun sparkles off the leading edge of the wing and my family look relaxed in sun hats; in London the sky is grey, the tarmac wet and everyone looks a bit down-trodden. If the sunny picture isn't enough to lighten my mood, then I look at the other one too.