Friday 16 May Kalymnos: good hair day

Beautiful sunny day today. Chris had the luxury of washing her hair and then sitting on the front deck in swimmers, reading a book while drying her hair in the wind and sun.. We had Americans on the boat on our port side (getting good at this nautical speak) who decided to up anchor and move out this morning. However the anchor had other ideas and after they had motored out about 50 metres the anchor was stuck fast. They circled around a few times went backwards and forwards but no joy. Chris offered to let the Port Police know what was happening and they said yes please. After running back and forth messaging between the two a couple of times, Chris got them to get on their radio and talk directly with the PP to get sorted.

Eventually after the guy had tried swinging off the front deck attempting to untangle what appeared to be quite a mess attached to his anchor chain they sat back and waited and waited for the diver to arrive. Sometime later the diver was able to detach their anchor from the chain and get them untangled and some grateful Americans finally floated away.

On a wander around the port we discovered another Clio occupied by a couple of Irishmen. She is smaller than ours but much older and so her claim to the name supersedes ours by a long shot. We had a very interesting discussion with the owner who is a seasoned sailor who spends at least 4 months of the year sailing these waters. He had just spent 2 years in Turkey so we were able again to source some useful information.

Back to Clio and we thought a nice quiet night but, we were wrong. After we had settled for the night we could hear a very animated Greek man sprucing on a loud speaker and then the best bit, an almighty explosion. Expecting to see a boat blown up or the mountain collapsing we looked outside to see locals carrying on as if nothing has happened. This went on into the night and eventually Chris thought someone must have been trying to blow up the sprucer without success because in between explosions he carried on.. We found out the next day that it was the local candidate running for mayor doing the sprucing, who turned out to be our electricity man. The explosions were the local fishermen throwing dynamite into the harbour as some kind of support for the wanna be politician. We also heard past horror stories of boys blowing off a hand and losing an eye from a faulty fuse and another fisherman whose body bits were found in the rigging of his boat. All of this done under the noses of the police who probably find it safer to stay clear of those events.