BLOG 3
AUTUMN CRUISE 2021
KARPATHOS TO RHODES
31 October to 11 November 2021
We are now in Rhodes, having left Leros on 25 October, and since then have cruised this autumn on the route illustrated below.
KARPATHOS – West coast
In our last Blog (2) we reported that we had just completed a 54-mile day-sail from Tilos island south to the northwest corner of
Karpathos island, where we anchored overnight in the narrow, long sheltered
inlet at Tristoma.
Along with Kassos to the south and the uninhabited
island of Saria to the north, the significantly larger island of Karpathos
forms a small archipelago midway between Crete and Rhodes.
After a comfortable night at anchor, we rose with the
sun. There was no wind in the inlet and its glassy bay reflected the
surrounding hills. We promptly weighed anchor, headed west up the inlet and
through its narrow entrance back into the open waters of the Aegean Sea.
Thereafter we motor-sailed the 26 miles south down the west coast of Karpathos to the small hamlet and port of Finiki. As we approached Finiki, our long-standing concern was (apparently) realised when the engine coughed, stuttered and stopped. Having left Island Drifter (ID) for two years on the hard, we were very conscious of the risk of our fuel having been contaminated with diesel bug, although we had no evidence to date that it had been, since we had filled the tanks to the brim and added diesel-bug preventer back in November 2019 before leaving Greece.
An hour later, having found no evidence, we realised that
we had actually run out of fuel! We therefore topped up the empty day-tank from
the main tank, bled the system and the engine started. We were both relieved
and embarrassed in equal measure!
On entering Finiki harbour our prop and rudder caught
on a fisherman’s abandoned (and submerged) buoy and float line. Arguably we were lucky that it was well tethered to the seabed, since otherwise we would have
drifted on to the inside of the harbour’s rocky outer breakwater. As it was, we
were tethered only ten metres from it.
Helen heroically went over the side and tried to
remove the rope and float but without an oxygen tank she was unsuccessful. She
therefore swam ashore to summon help. Fortunately, on the quay she met Dimitri,
a loquacious elderly Greek-American returnee – and ex-seaman. He got his nephew
to don diving gear and free the buoy and rope. Thereafter they took our lines
when we reversed and anchor-moored Med style on the quay.
Helen subsequently swam out to check that the anchor
was holding, since strong winds were expected overnight. No problem – it was
holding fast and fortunately had not snagged one of the many abandoned anchors,
chains and lumps of building debris that litter the harbour seabed.
That evening, we treated ourselves to supper out in Captain
Gianni’s, the only taverna (of the village’s six) that remained open. The
ubiquitous Dimitri was on hand to translate for Irena, the Ukrainian wife of
Gianni, whom he persuaded to keep the taverna kitchen open later than she’d
planned to feed us. The other customers were all local ‘old boys’, enjoying
their drinks and non-stop conversation. We appeared to be the only visitors left in the village.
That night it rained solidly for three hours
accompanied by lightning. Fortunately, the wind was from the north and hence
the hills and outer harbour breakwater provided even better protection than we
had anticipated from both the wind and fetch.
We’d stopped in Finiki because we’d never been there before, it was Iro’s childhood home and she’d strongly, and justifiably, recommended the island to us. (We’d met Iro on our flight back to the UK in November 2019 and have kept in touch.) We bypassed the island in 2017 because we were short of time. We’d first arrived in Greek waters in Crete and subsequently sailed from there directly to Rhodes.
The small hamlet of Finiki still remains recognisable
as the fishing village it used to be. Its blue and white houses front a small
gravel beach and sleepy fishing-orientated harbour with half a dozen tavernas
around it. The back streets contained some renovated buildings offering a limited
number of rooms to rent (by the day, week or month).
Agios Georgios beach nearby is considered one of the
better and, of equal importance, more accessible beaches on Karpathos. As we
subsequently found out, many of the good beaches are either accessible only by
boat or by a 4x4 able to negotiate the tortuously steep winding gravel tracks
leading down to them.
KASSOS
Unfortunately, it wasn’t possible to hire a car in
Finiki to tour the island, so we decided to move on next day. Dimitri, by now
our self-appointed mentor and guide, recommended that we went to the island’s
capital Pigadia on the east coast, but did so via the island of Kassos, since
the weather was currently unusually good, and the wind was forecast to be in
the right direction to do so. Good advice as it turned out.
Kassos, some 70 miles north of Crete, is incidentally
the southernmost Dodecanese island. Often battered by severe winds and
periodically cut off by violent seas, Kassos looks like the Greece that time
has forgotten. Port Fry’s pretty white houses with traditional blue doors and
shuttered windows, however, lie around an incongruously massive, EU-funded,
concrete slab of a dock inside an equally enormous, long rocky outer breakwater.
Consequently, the port is now very well protected from all directions.
The town has a small but very active fishing fleet
from which one can purchase fish directly from one of the boats. Indeed, as
they come into port the fishing boats hoot to announce their arrival. We
treated ourselves to two fagria, which Helen gutted, filleted, and pan-fried.
They were delicious.
Most of the island’s visitors are rare birds on
migration! In good weather in season day-trip boats may visit from Karpathos. The
Blue Star ferry calls once or twice a week – weather permitting – and a local ferry
runs up to four days a week to Karpathos – again weather permitting. Ninety per cent
of visitors who stay for a while are returnee islanders and their families,
known as Kassiops, who’d emigrated to America or Australia to seek employment.
In
1820, the Turkish-ruled island had 11,000 inhabitants and a large mercantile
fleet. In June 1824 an Egyptian fleet landed in Kassos and killed over 7,000
islanders, taking most of the rest as slaves. The island has never recovered.
This massacre is commemorated annually; Kassiops return from around the world
to participate. However, in November, when we visited, Port Fry was like a
ghost town, with its peeling façades and wind-pocked
streets.
Subsequently the island was slowly repopulated by
escapees, returnees and their families. It nevertheless remains underpopulated
and barren. Sheer gorges slash through the lunar terrain, relieved only by a
few smallholdings of midget olives trees and goats which somehow manage to
survive on the furze scrub. Most of the population live in Port Fry, although
there are five small hamlets on the coast facing Karpathos – leaving most of the
island uninhabited with many crumbling abandoned houses from a bygone era.
KARPATHOS – East Coast
We left Port Fry, Kassos at midnight and sailed
overnight to Pigadia, the capital of Karpathos on its east coast, to avoid the
strong head winds forecast for the next day. Arriving at the visitors’ quay in
Pigadia at 8 a.m., we discovered that we were the only visitors, so we went
alongside instead of anchor-mooring as would normally have been required.
Pigadia isn’t as photogenic as many other ports with
their blue and white or pastel-coloured houses. Indeed, it is something of a
concrete jungle with every narrow road seemingly one way! The place does,
however, grow on you and undoubtedly it is determinedly Greek. While there is
nothing particularly special to see in Pigadia, it does offer most facilities. It is now beginning to cater for Scandinavian and German package
holidaymakers, who stay either in the town or in one of the small southern beach
resorts. Enthusiastic hikers are also beginning to visit Karpathos so take advantage of the historic trails that run throughout the island.
We chose to go there since it has a safe harbour and
we felt able to leave the boat there while we explored the island. It also proved to
be a cheap and easy place in which to hire a car. Christina of Billy’s Rent A
Car delivered ours at 9 a.m. We spent the rest of the day touring the island.
Despite being the third largest Dodecanese island,
long narrow Karpathos is supposed to have always been a wild and underpopulated
backwater.
The island’s usually cloud-capped mountain spine, which rises to 1200 metres, divides it into two distinct sections: the low-lying south with its pretty bays and beaches, and the exceptionally rugged north, where traditional villages cling to mountain tops (historically to avoid pirate attacks). Deep ravines, particularly on the east coast, drop to tiny coves, accessible only by boat or by a 4x4 down tortuously steep, winding narrow gravel tracks. We, in our hired Fiat Panda, chickened out!
Ag
Minas beach on the east coast – note the grove of midget olive treesTarmac mountain roads with incredible views wind north
from Pigadia, taking one up into the clouds.
The east
coast road, which we travelled on first, terminates in the north at Difania, a
small beach resort and ferry port. In the days before the road was improved
(thanks to the EU), people used to arrive by ferry in Difania to visit the nearby
pastel-coloured Olymbos village, where the inhabitants still wear traditional
Greek costume and speak in their own dialect thought to be based on Dorian
Greek.
Central Karpathos contains a dozen villages blessed
with commanding hillside locations, ample water, and a cool climate even in
August. First among these is Aperi, the former chora [capital] and still home
to the island’s cathedral. Dominated by expensive holiday homes built by US émigrés,
it offers an interesting contrast to the more traditional villages elsewhere.
At regular intervals on our tour of the island, we
came across herds of goats wandering in the road – usually lurking round a
hairpin bend!
Many villagers have lived in North America or
Australia before returning home with their nest-eggs; hence the area allegedly
has the highest per capita income in any of the Greek islands.
KASTELLORIZO
Since the weather remained benign, we decided to extend our Autumn Cruise by sailing to Kastellorizo, the most easterly Greek
island. While the only inhabited one, it is part of a small remote archipelago
of Greek islets and is located 70 miles east of Rhodes, the nearest Greek island, and barely a nautical
mile off Kas on the Turkish mainland.
Since our direct passage from Karpathos was
approximately 120 miles, we left in the early morning to ensure that we arrived
in Kastellorizo the following morning – in daylight.
During the night while motor-sailing, we made the elementary (on reflection!)
mistake of topping up our starboard day fuel tank from the port main tank.
Within 30 seconds of restarting the engine, it spluttered and faded out. This
time we hadn’t run out of fuel but, clearly, we had a fuel problem. After due
consideration, we concluded that the fuel transferred from the main tank must
have stirred up diesel-bug sediment in the day-tank, the particles of which can
be very fine – the final straw in so far as the filters were concerned. We left
the tank to ‘settle down’ while changing the filters and bleeding the engine and were mightily relieved
when we eventually got the engine started again, since we still had 27 miles to
go and there was no wind either then or even forecast!
Kastellorizo’s harbour is said to
be one of the best on the Mediterranean coast running from Beirut to Fethiye in Turkey. It
is similar in some ways to Symi (northeast of Rhodes) in terms of its
architecture, in that the town’s two-storey buildings fringe the harbour and
are painted in different pastel colours. However, it has a lower-key,
friendlier and more Greek feel compared to the tourist trap of Symi. It is the
sort of place that the Greeks describe as a klouví (a birdcage), a place where, after two strolls along the pedestrianised
quay, you’ll be on nodding terms with both locals and visitors.
If you’re lucky, as we were, you might also see one or
two of the small colony of large loggerhead turtles (carretta carretta) that frequent
the bay. Despite signs to the contrary, tourists throw bread into the water to
attract shoals of tiny fish, which the turtles hoover up.
The quay was extremely low, with large concrete mooring
bollards; so low, in fact, that we had to use the dinghy to get ashore, since
it would have been really challenging abseiling down or climbing up our passerelle from either the stern or
bow.
The only other visiting boat, which was hogging the
small quay, was ROCK – a monster, fully crewed ‘gin palace’ which was on
charter to a couple with, presumably, more than adequate means!
The island’s permanent population has dwindled from around 10,000 a century ago to some 300 today. Its period of prosperity ended with the Turko-Italian War in the early 1920s, when the Levant was effectively dismembered as a trading force. It was occupied by the French (1915–21) and then by the Italians until they capitulated to the Allies in 1943. Soon after that the Germans took over when British Forces withdrew from the Dodecanese. During WWII Kastellorizo was badly damaged when it was bombed and fire destroyed many of the buildings. After the War the island, as part of the Dodecanese, was handed over to Greece.
The island’s population is concentrated in the port
itself. Those that remain are supported by remittances from more than 30,000
emigrants, as well as by hefty subsidies from the Greek government to prevent
the island reverting to Turkish rule.
RHODES
We decided to start making our way back to Leros from
Kastellorizo via Rhodes where, having been there before, we were confident that
quality yacht services would be available to help fix our ‘fuel problem’.
Even so, we had serious concerns about the fuel
situation and whether we’d make it to Rhodes. We therefore left at sunset under
engine only once the wind had dropped – had we sailed we risked stirring up the
fuel in the tank by heeling over while making our way west along the Turkish
coast towards Rhodes. This time we kept the revs high, never stopped the engine
and certainly didn’t risk a transfer of fuel between tanks!
As we approached Rhodes, a Coast Guard launch raced
up, presumably to check us out. By the time it got near, we’d had time to make
sure the red ensign was flying freely, and Helen was visibly alone at the
wheel! After circling around us with binos out, they obviously decided we
weren’t a major risk and zoomed off back to Rhodes.
We phoned ahead and spoke to Georgios, the harbour
master of Mandraki Harbour, whom we had met before in 2017, and were allocated
a place on the quay. There we initially anchor-moored Med style stern-to.
Subsequently we found there were private laid lines we could pick up and attach
for extra security.
Once we were established, Georgios, at our request, arranged for an engineer to call after lunch. We were joined then by Sabri
Ibrahim, a Sudanese self-employed marine engineer. After discussing the fuel and
engine situation with him, he agreed that almost certainly we had a diesel-bug
problem and that he was prepared to help us with it immediately. This subsequently
involved:
- opening up and cleaning the main tank after transferring the diesel into our empty fuel cans, then replacing the fuel ready for it to be cleaned (our job);
- transferring the contents of the day-tank to the in-hull main tank;
- removing the plastic day-tank and taking it to steam clean, before re-installing it;
- hiring a diesel fuel separator pump;
- running the separator pump for 12 hours to cleanse the diesel;
- transferring the cleansed fuel from the main tank to the day-tank;
- replacing the filters and cleaning the fuel pipes;
- installing, on his own volition, what he described as a ‘proper air filter’, which, incidentally, he imports from the UK. He dismissed our Volvo sponge one as being dangerous, in that they can disintegrate and get sucked into the engine;
- bleeding the fuel system before starting the engine.
To our relief the engine started first time and ran
sweetly. We left it running for a couple of hours, to make sure there wasn’t a
problem. Mike, incidentally, had come across a separator pump some twenty years
ago when delivering a boat up the Pacific from Panama to San Diego. On that
occasion, the separator filters ended up completely clogged with debris. On this
occasion, most of the debris extracted was of fine black particles which, we
understand, are the initial stages in the growth of diesel bug. This develops
into jelly-like lumps at a later stage. Possibly the reason, we think, Mike
couldn’t get the engine to restart, on our passage to Kastellorizo, until he’d
changed the fine fuel filter, which he’d originally assumed wasn’t necessary.
Sabri was clearly an experienced marine engineer. He
has been in Greece for 22 years, having previously worked for the Italian Navy
and in Rhodes boatyards. He and his wife speak four languages well; his two
children speak only three! We were very fortunate to obtain his services and
indeed enjoyed his cheerful and optimistic company over the two days it took to
complete the job.
Our gas bottle was returned by the supermarket because they said that the gas station did not have the correct fitment to refill a British propane bottle. On hearing this, Sabri volunteered to sort it out himself! He took the bottle away, acquired an appropriate fitment, and sat at the gas company until they filled it, before coming back with a full bottle! We were most grateful as it’s always a nightmare finding somewhere in Greece that will refill a UK cylinder.
We now intend to have a couple of days ‘off’ in Rhodes
while the current northerly blow goes through, before continuing our return
journey through the Dodecanese Islands to Leros.
While we may have had a few ‘issues’ on our Autumn
2021 Cruise, we have achieved our principal objective of sorting out our boat
and administrative matters in respect of our future cruising plans. To date,
therefore, it has been a successful and enjoyable cruise.
Dear Lotus Eaters, Enjoyed Blog3 thanks. Remembered Kastellorizo when sailing under Turkish colours years ago, a few hours of bureaucracy !
ReplyDeleteFound the fuel saga v interesting...Love to both S& M