Leaving Lakki, Leros and running downwind only 10 or 12 miles in a corking northerly Meltimi, we reached Kalymnos Island - one of the most massive volcanic hulks in the Aegean. You can get a sense of it in the middle picture above, which was adjacent to where we anchored.

We hadn't realized it when we visited last year, but those sheer rock cliffs are world famous in the sport of rock climbing as you can see from the poster pics of climbers in action - can cousin Mike be tempted to top off his transcontinental bike ride with a wall climb???

The island has lots more to offer, too, and we were enchanted by it kitchy quaintness (we loved the frog), great scenery as behind Katherine and it's rather indifferent yet accommodating attitude to tourists - a very appealing place indeed.

But it's original claim to fame was as the sponge diving capital of the world. Katherine struck up a quick rapport with the curator of the sponge museum, whose father and grandfather had both been captains of sponge ships. We got the royal tour of the place - there's Katherine below with the curator standing in front of one the old hard hat suits they used after they advanced from free diving with those 40 pound stones you see to the left.

The naked young divers (there's a statue of one) grabbed the stone, took a deep breath and dived in to sink to some 180 feet - incredible! Then they grabbed as many sponges as they could, jerked on the rope and the boat crew hauled them up as fast as possible.

The final pictures are of a successful crew - which they defined as returning with a lot of sponges and having had no deaths - an all too common occurrence - and of one of the more unusual shaped sponges.

And, yes, Craig did dive down and harvest a sponge, and no, he wasn't naked and he went down all of 8 feet - not 180!