First trip after lockdown: Sailing in Greece
From Athens to Syros, from Syros to Kimolos
It was a spontaneous decision. Europe had slowly begun to end lockdown restrictions and travel was possible again. At first, Charlie wasn’t too sure whether she should, but you know her. Of course, she did that trip. A friend of hers, Pablo, had been travelling through Europe for a year and had decided to stay in Athens until the world would go back to normal. He invited Charlie to visit him in Greece.
The evening before her departure, he rang her with a surprising idea. They had the chance to join on a sailing trip with a school he had taken a skipper course with. The courses usually started on Saturdays, but Charlie arrived on a Tuesday. 7SeasSailing though made it happen.
Travelling in the new world
Travel restrictions had been mostly lifted after the months of lockdown during the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and Charlie was on the move again. The most budget-friendly connection for her was to take a flight to Vienna first, then Athens. Charlie didn’t know what to expect, but in the end it wasn’t all that exciting. The only difference was that she had to wear a face mask and her temperature was taken at the coach to the airport. When she landed in Vienna, she was asked where she had been the past 10 days and that was it. There was hand sanitiser on every corner at the airport and the one in Vienna had a very strong scent of Tequila. When she arrived in Athens, she was asked to show the form she had had to fill out before departure and she could continue her journey.
As the plane landed in Athens, it was exactly the time when the moon was rising and it was blood red…
From Athens to the islands
Charlie slept that night in Pablo’s flat in Athens, he was already on the sailing boat. She would take the ferry from Piraeus at 7am to join the sailing crew on the island of Syros.
The crew were her friend Pablo, Daria who was from Croatia but lived in Athens, Dimitris who was Greek but had been living in the UK for more than 30 years and was regularly spending his holidays in Greece and Vangelis who was the sailing instructor. Before they left the Finikas Marina in Syros, the whole crew practiced how to park the sailing boat in between other boats. Charlie was lucky that they did not expect anything from her on her first day. She was just watching and learning.
After the practice sessions, they started their journey to Serifos, another one of Cyclades islands. Since Charlie had planned the trip quite spontaneously, she wasn’t able to take the whole time off and had to get some work done. That went well until she started feeling a little seasick… She had not been prepared for that. Dimitris suggested for her to take the helm and navigate the boat as it would get better when you’re standing and focusing on something else. She hadn’t been prepared for that either, but it did indeed help and it was easier than you would expect. She safely navigated the boat through the Aegean Sea. They arrived at Serifos in the early afternoon and anchored in a bay in front of a beautiful beach. The first thing they did was take a dip in the crystal-clear waters. It was lovely to be in the sea again!
Night sailing
For that day, Vangelis had planned something special: they would be sailing in the dark to learn how to navigate at night and to have a swim under the midnight moon. But before they could leave, there was one thing Vangelis wanted Charlie to learn: the lines. She would follow each and every rope on the sailing boat to understand its functionality and how to work with it. It felt as if she was learning a new language, but she is not going to bore you now with terminology (she would probably get it wrong anyways).
The Island of Kimolos
It was almost midnight when they reached Kimolos. Even in the darkness, that chalk mines where the island got its name from (from the Greek word Kimolia), were well visible.
As it turned out, Vangelis was not only an instructor for skipper courses, but also a perfect tour guide with a wealth of local knowledge. That’s how Charlie learned that the island of Kimolos was first inhabited in 3000 BC, inhabited by the Franks after the fall of Constantinople, before the Turks took over. Nowadays, the latest building on the island, mainly churches, date back to the 17th and 18th century.
After the midnight swim under the (almost-) full moon, Charlie fell into bed in her cabin and slept like a baby. The light movement of the boat in the bay was a great advantage.
