Sun 16 Jun and Mon 17 Jun – Sounion

On Sunday we continued making our way east towards Sounion, which was about 25NM from our bay Klima Beach. The Cape of Sounion is the SE corner of the Greek mainland east of Athens, and home to a famous Temple of Poseidon.

The winds looked favourable so we picked up anchor and set off. The forecast turned out to be mostly accurate. During the first half hour or so there wasn’t much wind so we pottered up along the coast. It then picked up a bit so we got the sails up.

To get to Sounion we had to cross a 5 mile wide shipping lane, always a bit scary with big tankers going through at high speeds. We welcomed Murphy on board once more as just as we were getting into the shipping lane the wind dropped completely and we had to stick on the engine. The sea state was really horrible. There was no direction to the swell and the boat got whacked around left and right as we were heading into the channel. The Collision Regulations state that vessels must cross traffic separation schemes as a right angle to the main traffic (as it’s the shortest path). For us, doing only 3 knots, this was going to take over an hour!

We managed to dodge a few tankers and saw white horses on the water on the east side of the channel, which meant: sailing (hurray!) so out came the jib. As we got underway and closer to land the wind started building and building. We soon had a second reef in. Our original plan was to anchor in Palaia Fokia for the night, a bay that looked nicely protected from the north easterly winds. As we came close we realised there was no way we would be able to make into the bay, as the gusts rolling off the hill had a lot of power and we had the wind right on the nose. Slightly hesitantly we decided to press on to Sounion instead which was about 12 miles further south and east. Coming around the west tip of Cape Sounion was quite an adventure, as the wind was gusting in the upper twenties and it gets quite shallow there. We stuck in the third reef with and with that we took the channel comfortably, watching yachts around us heeling with far too much sail uo. Coming up to Sounion we found a nice spot and once the anchor was dropped we were sitting nicely with the wind still blowing twenty knots. We celebrated our successful passage with an adult beverage and turned in for the night. 

On Monday we took the dingy ashore to check out Poseidon’s temple. It’s an impressive sight on top of a fairly steep hill, and trekking up there made for a good morning exercise. We spotted a little tortoise trying to escape our views by climbing up the curb into some bushes. He managed to get his front end up and we gave him a little hand to hoist the rest of his house up onto the wall. We had a good old look around the temple, a much needed coffee and made our way back to the boat just before a few busloads of tourists arrived. Phew!

Back on the boat we packed up and made our way around the corner to Olympic Marina, where we moored up so we could do our oil change. We invested in a new pump which made extracting the old oil so much easier! It was also helped by being hot still from our motor to the marina. That evening we went for showers and dinner in the marina and got a few free drinks – result!