Birvidik

'Paranoia strikes deep
Into your lives it will creep...'

No doubt about it, they're definitely out to get me. If the weather can't do it then the Greeks will have a damned good go.

We waited for a stable weather window and set off for Syros, where we moored up against the town quay after a satisfyingly smooth and uneventful trip. We moored stern-to, dropping our main bow anchor and motoring astern to the quay and tying to it. Traditionally we have moored bows-to in these circumstances as reported in tedious detail in blogs passim. As is usual in cruising the final choice is a compromise between conflicting factors. In this case the balance was tipped in favour of stern-to by two main considerations. Firstly, the holding was not reported to be the best and the pilot murmured dark warnings about ferry wash. We reckoned that our vastly oversized main anchor would hold us off the quay better than the lighter and less efficient stern anchor. Secondly, the pilot also warned of unpleasant smells originating from the large quantities of raw sewage discharged into the harbour. This also explained the sloppy, gooey bottom and resultant bad holding. The stern anchor and chain would have had to have been lifted by hand when we left and I didn't fancy ending up coated in a sticky culture of every pathogen known to medical science. So stern-to it was.

Our crew roster is the opposite of that usually employed on cruising boats where the bloke poses on the helm while the poor woman runs around doing all the grunt work. When we approach a stern to mooring Liz assumes station at the helm. I then put out fenders at the required height on both sides of the boat. Next I dig out the mooring ropes, uncoil them, run them through the stern fairleads, tie them off on cleats and then re-coil them ready for heaving. After that I lower the stern platform and secure it in position prior to fixing the access ladder in place. I then run to the bow, slack off the anchor windlass and heave the anchor over the bow roller. Liz then starts to go astern toward the quay and I drop anchor and release the windlass to allow the chain to run free. Once the chain is running freely I need to run back to the stern to see if there are any helpful passers-by to whom I can throw the stern lines. No luck in this case. Plenty of ghouls, but no assistance.

Undeterred, I then guide Liz in going astern until the shore is within reach and make a desperate leap for the shore whilst simultaneously holding on to the two stern ropes. If by some miracle I reach the land unscathed and still in possession of the two ropes, I make them fast to the quay somewhere (anywhere) and then frantically fend the boat off in a generally futile attempt to stop it crashing into the concrete quay and spilling the café frappes of the assorted beautiful people at the waterside tables. At this point, Liz goes ahead to try to minimise the destruction wrought by the quay whilst I simultaneously scrabble back onto the rapidly receding stern platform before I need to demonstrate a claim to being the reincarnation of Jesse Owens in order to get back on.. Once back onboard I run to the bow and take up the anchor chain until it is bar-tight and the anchor has bitten. All that now remains to be done is spend half an hour adjusting the stern lines and anchor chain alternately until the boat is nicely snugged at a convenient distance for getting ashore.

During all this, Liz sits on the helmsman's seat waggling the wheel and playing with the girlie buttons (bow thrusters).

After the previous two weeks of quiet, isolated anchorages, Ermiopoulis, the capital of Syros and erstwhile capital of the Cyclades, made a stimulating change. The town quay was the social centre of the town, abuzz with cars, motorcycles and pedestrians. The far side of the road from the quay was lined with shops and, primarily, cafes, bars and restaurants. The last-mentioned three businesses had spread to occupy the quay space opposite, which they had covered with tables, chairs and sun awnings. Waiters and waitresses traversed the no man's land of the mainroad, carrying an endless procession of food and drink in one direction and the detritus of consumption in the other. They negotiated the chaotic traffic, side-stepping and pirouetting with easy, practiced grace. The whole area, already busy throughout the day, reached its climax in the evening when what seemed like every soul on the island either paraded up and down in the evening paseio, or watched unselfconsciously from the myriad café tables. Einstein sat on the stern with her eyes out on stalks.

Rapidly going native, we repaired to the nearest café to Birvidik for a drink before dinner. Halfway through I nipped back on board to pick up some money. While down below, I heard the rumble of a ferry's engines echoing through the hull. I mentioned ferries earlier, didn't I.

Ferries occupy a special place in Greek society. The reason for this becomes apparent if you ever look at a map of Greece. Most countries, unless they are landlocked, consist of a mainland area with a varying extent of coastline and a varying number of islands. It is usually the mainland that defines the country and the islands, if present, are embellishments. Look at a map of Greece and you get a completely different impression. The country covers a land area of 132 000 square kilometres. Over 20% of this is made up of islands, and the whole caboodle is spread over an area five times as large as the land area. The overall effect is to make up a country by chopping Portugal into bite-sized pieces and scattering the result over a sea area the size of France.

This gives the whole country a bit of an identity crisis. Peoples' loyalties tend to be assigned primarily to their island. A Cretan usually defines himself as Cretan first and Greek second. This effect is exacerbated by history. The country only really came into existence in 1832 after the Greek war of independence freed them from Ottoman rule. Even then it was far from what we now know as modern Greece. Most of the islands were still under the Ottoman Turks, some were occupied by the Italians and the Ionians by Britain. There is also the tendency of the younger islanders to migrate to Athens in search of work, leaving the island communities shrinking and dying (both literally and metaphorically).

The Greek government has developed various strategies to counteract this, among them granting a lower rate of VAT to the further islands such as the Dodecanese. At the core of their efforts are the ferries and, more recently, the internal air links. The ferries are the social, cultural, economic and logistical glue holding this disparate conglomeration into some form of national whole. Ferries are subsidised and are the lifeline to these isolated island communities. Island life frequently revolves around the ferry schedules.

As a result, ferry skippers consider themselves God, or if not God then at least on a par with the Archangel Gabriel. When their several thousand tonne leviathan enters harbour it does so at high speed and with the plain expectation that everyone else will just get the fuck out of the way. With, it must be grudgingly admitted, considerable élan he then executes a handbrake turn, throws on full power ahead and screeches to a halt within spitting distance of the quay. Impressive though this is, it does displace an awful lot of water, which has to go somewhere. Where it goes is all round the harbour and along the quay in the form of a series of metre high waves travelling at about seven miles an hour. This plays havoc with small boats tied up to the quay.

Birvidik, in common with all the other boats on the quay, lurched, bucked, surged, pitched and rolled, straining at the lines holding her to the rusted fittings on the quay which were, by now, definitely not looking man enough for the job. Clinging on to the mizzen mast like a drunk round a lamppost, I cast a worried glance around me. There are a range of unpleasant possibilities in a situation such as this. The most obvious is that the surge will carry you back and crash the stern repeatedly into the rough concrete quay. It got close, but the fenders we had deployed at the stern managed to avert that. The second is that the anchor is pulled free and the boat swings sideways, crashes across the neighbouring boats and proceeds to pound its whole side repeatedly etc etc. Nope - the anchor held. Failing that, the violent rolling motion of the boats could result in the mast crashing into next door's mast and ripping off shrouds, crosstrees or worse still losing the mast completely. OK there. We'd thought to position the boat so that the masts didn't align with those either side. If you survive all those, the next problem is if you and the next boat roll sideways and manage to catch the capping rail or the join between the deck and the hull. At best you'll lose the capping rail and at worst the deck will peel away from the hull like the toecap from an old boot.

We just scraped through on all counts and after about 10 minutes it all settled down enough for me to get off the boat. With a sigh of relief I sat at the table to finish my drink.

Did I mention that these ferries have a very short turn-around time?

Fifteen minutes later we were on the edge of our seats as the whole thing started off again. Luckily the wash from a leaving ferry is not as bad as that from when it arrives. Neither was this the only ferry creating havoc, although it was by far the worst. We reckoned we could manage to put up with it for a few days, but the next Met I got indicated that if we didn't leave PDQ we'd be stuck there for another week or so. The prospect of enduring that ferry wash for a total of about 10 days concentrated the mind wonderfully, and we set off for Kithnos the next day. Once again the sea was flat calm. We looked forward to a peaceful and uneventful trip. And so it was, for the first couple of hours.

After those first couple of hours, we glanced astern and saw a couple of faint dots on the horizon. A few minutes later this had clarified and increased to several quite large dots, chucking out a considerable amount of smoke. Glancing behind about ten minutes after that revealed four Greek navy destroyers steaming line astern at high speed - damned near 30 knots according to the radar. I thought Greece was skint. Where do they get the money to burn fuel at that rate? They were catching up on us alarmingly quickly. Never mind, I thought, they're navy ships, crewed by highly trained professionals. They'll know the colregs inside out. The colregs, in this situation, stipulate that as the overtaking vessels it was their responsibility to keep out of our way. We held our course and speed. They came progressively closer. Two rather worrying possibilities occurred to us.

1 The skippers of the destroyers had delusions of grandeur and thought they were ferry skippers, or

2 Warships are excused colregs because they have a note from their mum, namely the Government

In the end, they hammered past about 200 metres on our starboard side. However, 4 x 8 000 tonnes of shipping travelling at nearly 30 knots produces an awful lot of wash. Then there is the interaction between the sequence of bow and stern waves of each boat. By the time these primary waves had reached us they were probably no more than about a couple of metres high.

I suspect that a detailed explanation of constructive interference would lose us what few remaining readers we may have, but believe me, when fours sets of waves like that reinforce each other they can produce some real mothers. By the time the effect of the interference had become apparent there was no time to turn into them and they hit us square on the beam. This threw us into possibly the most violent rolling I think we've ever experienced - worse than Biscay and worse than the recent bit of unpleasantness around Naxos. We swung like a metronome, from almost flat on our port side to almost flat on our starboard side and back again. And again, and again. Luckily, it only lasted about four minutes. The effects though were spectacular. Once stability had returned we spent the next half an hour clearing up the carnage below. The destroyers faded into the distance

So, with the day's excitement comfortably out of the way we continued heading due West, towards the Northern tip of Kithnos. As we approached Kithnos I glanced over my shoulder to see another faint dot on the horizon, also chucking out smoke. This turned out to be the NEL ferry from Syros, making about 20 knots according to the radar and dead on course to hit us smack up the jaxie. A quick bit of mental arithmetic suggested that it would be a close run thing as to whether we reached the tip of Kithnos and turned left before it played steamroller with us. To give us a sporting chance I increased the revs. After 10 minutes of cat and mouse it became apparent that we'd make the corner first, which we did and turned to port, heading South, close along the coast of Kithnos.

We looked behind, expecting to see the ferry, by now only some 500 metres behind us, steam past heading for the Greek mainland. Unfortunately, it did no such thing. Instead it executed a sharp 90 degree left turn and steamed straight toward us, still at full speed. There was little we could do. The colregs said we should hold our course and speed and that the ferry, as overtaking vessel, should take avoiding action. So we held our course, speed and breath. Still it bore down on us, heading straight for our stern. I tried calling them on the VHF so that we could agree on a course of action, but got no reply.

The colregs also state that, if a collision looks likely, the stand-on vessel (that's us) should take (and I quote) "such evasive action as is appropriate under the circumstances". They make no effort to explain what such actions might be, but I was pretty sure that going hard astern wasn't one of them. Trying to outrun it wasn't much of an option either - at best it might give us another 15 seconds before impact. That left us with turning to port or to starboard. There wasn't any sea room to port as we were close to the steep-to cliffs. If turning that way didn't drive us onto the rocks then the wash from the ferry, at such close range, probably would.

That left starboard. The problem with turning to starboard was that, should the ferry skipper suddenly wake up and take avoiding action, then turning to starboard is exactly what he would do, thus still succeeding in liquidising us, only in slightly deeper water. A final radio call elicited no response and with the thing towering over us less than a hundred metres away I said "Oh sod it!", threw the wheel hard to starboard and gave the engine everything it had.

The ferry carried on blithely across our stern, missing us by less than 50 metres. The wash picked us up and we surfed out of harm's way before turning in a wide circle to get back on course through the turbulent water that marked the ferry's passing. Ignoring my slurs on the parentage, mental capacity and onanistic tendencies of its skipper the ferry sped on regardless for Kithnos town. I suspect it has a route plugged into its chartplotter and that is the route it takes, and bollocks to anybody else who happens to be around.

I must look up and memorise the Greek for "Oi - Shit for brains!"