Monday 6 May: From Naxos to Demonikos Amorgos

On Saturday we were pretty much ready (including hoisting the tender on board) to move to AntiParos/Demonkos when Simon and Jim on Helios (another Ozzie boat in the Meds we met before in Loutra) dropped anchor next to us. They came over for coffee and we decided to stay in Naxos for dinner that nite. The Flamenco restaurant, with a great view of the harbour and the neighboring islands, was chosen and we had a great meal there. There was even Greek Sirtaki dancing (hoppa) which Chis happily joining in, we have it on video.

Next day it turned out that the small inverter we bought last year in the little emporium on Hydra was not charging the laptop anymore (no blog-updates, no photo/video backup, no movies at nite). As Naxos was the most likely place to get a better inverter, we stayed until Monday, with Jim and Simon dropping in on Sunday nite for another chat.

Monday morning Simon kindly gave us a lift to the shore in his fancy hard-bottom duckie (Rigid Inflatable Boat) and we found a 300W inverter, a couple of LED lights to replace the power-devouring halogen bulbs and some other bits and bobs.

After being dropped off by our personal water-taxi (thanks again Simon), Helios pulled up anchor and left for Mykonos. We followed suit, but in opposite direction, initially heading for AntiParos and Demonikos, South of Naxos. We had around 15 kts wind pretty much on the nose from the S and had to tack south for an hour or two (see map with our day's track). Our last long tack took us to the southern-most tip of Naxos and as Clio was obviously having fun in a broad-reach wind, and we were already half-way to Amorgos, we decide to go with the (wind) flow and continued to Amorgos. To get there, our track snaked through a little island group between Naxos and Amorgos with some interesting bathymetric surprises of bottoms rising from over 100 m depth to 10 m in a very short distance. One time Clio's shallow-water alarm went off. Depth alarms (should) raise the hairs on every skipper's neck, and mine were sticking out like barb-wire. As it turned out, the depth sounder could not cope with depths over 200m and reverted back to 4m. All in all a great sail and we're sure Chris and Maggie would have loved it.

No more adventures and we perfectly berthed stern-to around 18:30 in Katapola (which sounds like an indigenous NZ parrot to me). 'Easy in no-wind' was the crew's derogatory response when the finely honed berthing procedure was pointed out. After getting Clio ready for the night, including much needed shore power, we had a drink on a local terrace and a truly excellent meal at the Mythos restaurant, a 10 m crawl from Clio. Our first impression of Katapola is that it is a very nice, down-to-earth and locals-mainly place. I think it is love-at-first-sight. We'll keep you informed.