Our Second Stop, Lemnos, otherwise known as Limnos

After a bit of an auspicious start to the day (30th June) we had a wonderful 56NM sail from Samothrace which took us 9 1/2 hours, of which only 1.9 hours was under engine and that included leaving the port on Samothrace and arriving and anchoring in Myrina on Lemnos. I say auspicious because by the time we came to leave Samothrace the quay was full to the brim, all alongside, with boats getting in spaces both behind us and in front that you would not have thought possible. That meant we had about a metre behind us and even less in front.So having pulled our bow in as tight as possible to the quay without going an inch forward, to push her stern off the quay, we started reversing. The big issue was the boat behind us had a very long spinnaker pole on its deck, protruding a fair distance from her bow. As we reversed we snagged it on one of our fender lines, which stopped us maneuvering with frightening effect and threatened to bring our newly polished hull in contact with theirs. Fortunately the guys were on board and awake and and some quick reactions from them and David got us free and we were off, no contact occurring, phew, heading for Lemnos.

Lemnos, or Limos is situated in the middle of the Northern Aegean, all on its lonesome. As a result few tourists go there, certainly and thankfully no cruise liners to put thousands of passengers onto its shores. The islands don’t really understand it, they say ‘We have fine beaches, clear water, good harbours and friendly people, but no tourists – Why?’ We cant answer that question either! The locals were incredibly friendly and helpful, oh, apart from a a Tourist boat Captain, who we nicknamed ‘Grumpy George’, who was consistently moaning about any yachts mooring within about 20 metres of his boat, but in the end we, like everybody else just ignored him. There were also a lot of mature gentlemen of the island that seemed to have substantial walking difficulties, which we later ascertained was due to them drinking copious amounts of Tsipouro during their life, which is a bit like Ouzo!

We first found a beautiful and deserted anchorage on the north west tip of Lemnos, Ormos Mourtzeflos, and really fancied staying there for the night. However having dropped the pick we realised that we had no signal, not normally a problem, however we were waiting for the shipping quote for the dinghy from Malta so now wasn’t the time.

Ormos Mourtzeflos

We stopped for an hour for a spot of lunch before having a wonderful downwind sail to Myrina.

The Approaches to Myrina

We arrived at Myrina on Lemnos at 6pm and decided to spend our first night there on anchor rather than on the main quay. Not sure David appreciated that decision after it took 4 attempts before our anchor would bite and hold us firm. Still in the end it was worth it! With clear waters beneath us it was tempting to go for a swim, that is until we clocked the water temperature at a little over 20 degrees, and everyone knows what wusses we are until the air temperature was hot enough to necessitate it! Summer hasn’t properly started here yet, we are still sleeping under our duvets, with definitely no need for air con, but we aren’t complaining!

It was a beautiful evening, with dinner and of course vino on board, we even remembered we didn’t have a functioning mooring light and rigged a temporary one off the boom.

The following morning we decided to go onto the quay, for a number of reasons, we wanted to explore the town and didn’t want to tempt fate with our poorly dingy, the forecast was showing pretty strong winds over the next few days and we didn’t want to not get a spot when all the boats came running for shelter and we, well I, with David doing all the hard work on the winch, had to go up the mast to see if we could fix our mooring light… and really didn’t fancy doing that whilst the boat was sailing round her anchor!

It was a fairly straight forward mooring with no incidents I am pleased to say, so without further ado, I donned the bosun’s chair and David got winching…..

Safely done, light fixed, although perhaps only temporarily, we then went walkabout through the tiny streets of Myrina, the capital of the island, previously called Castro after the castle which dominates the town from above, in search of David’s favorite, Orange cake, (success) and stopped for a drink on the other side of this tiny town to watch the sunset over Mount Athos in the distance, (not so successful), and a bite to eat out in a cutesy off the beaten track taverna with typical Greek chairs, need I say more!

Most of the life, except for shoppers, was spent round the port itself…

With the winds steadily increasing, we decided to stay put in the wonderful little place for a few days, so the following day we set about the task of once again resourcing the dinghy. Given the shock of the transport costs from Malta, which was 1100 euros plus vat, we decided to trying looking close to home.. this time in Turkey, and as luck would have it, found the last one in stock, the new deliveries not arriving until the end of August. However it was in Marmaris, which was quite a bit south of us, (slight understatement). Not an issue, said the agent in Marmaris, I can ship it to Ayvalik, still for about 10 times less than from Malta…and Ayvalik was 10 miles from our next stop, Lesvos! which we could get to very easily from Lesvos, our next stop! Hooray, we thought we had cracked it! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Things are really never that easy! We of course couldn’t just get it shipped across to Lesvos without having a Greek Customs nightmare, and it was really too big and obvious for us to jump on the ferry from Lesvos to Ayvalik and bring it back ourselves. So we started to look at a little detour to our planned trip, one that meant a week in the beautiful Turkish waters in this neck of the woods.It was then that we hit two major obstacles..

1. If we took the yacht out of European waters, we could lose our European Vat status ( and some of you will remember the heartache that Brexit caused us over this issue).. that would mean the dinghy could cost us circa 25k euros… perhaps not!
2. We didn’t have a Greek transit log… something that we still needed as Seaclusion has a British flag, and something we didn’t know. Having been bollocked by the Port Authority and told we had to report to customs, which was closed and not opening for another 3 hours, we had a really squeaky bum time for a while. Thankfully the customs lady was absolutely lovely, she just issued us with the relevant paperwork and sent us on our way… certainly not one of the usual officious customs officers we have come across on our previous travels.

However that still left us without a dinghy. That was until we got chatting to our neighbour who was Turkish, and a member of a 2000 strong sailing community, who put out a call for help and found one kind sailor who was coming from Istanbul later that week, stopping in Ayvalik and then heading to Lesvos, who was willing to pick it up for us! Aside from deciding whether to trust a complete stranger who could easily sail off into the sunset never to be seen again, we had the task of getting it delivered in time to meet him! Two hours later, it was all sussed, all we had to do was wait, and trust… more on that in our next installment.

Seriously in need of a bottle of vino at this point, we were just about to pop across the pavement to the nearest tavern for just that, and some food of course, when all this hooting started and we stopped to watch a novel wedding parade! I think we counted circa 10 trucks in the parade..

And later that night, a another novel town hall meeting! Didn’t understand a word, it was all Greek to me…

The following morning, holiday mode almost resumed, we got up early to walk up to the castle and take in the views which were stunning and worth the climb!

And guess what, on our way back down and back through the town, we found an easy launderette …. hooray, if you recall last year these were like gold dust, so we jumped at the chance with glee!

All done, we then just had to wait out the winds before we could head off again to find an anchorage on the south coast before exploring Moudhros Bay which was once the base for the Gallopi campaign many decades ago.

The following day we headed for Moudros, however as we turned the corner to head northwards into the bay the north winds picked up again, and not fancying beating our way up, we turned south to head for Lesvos and our next chapter!

6th July 2022