The Tiny & Picturesque Island of Oinoussa

So on the 15th July, after a night of not nearly enough sleep we turned southwards again, heading to the tiny island of Oinoussa just off the north east coast of Chios, with Force 6 gusting 7 winds pushing us along with nothing but our Genoa out, and even that was reefed!

7 hours later we arrived at this wonderful peaceful haven, sheltered by a couple of other islands, well not sure you would call them islands, more like almost uninhabited rocks, except for… yep you guessed it a couple of churches and monastery! Having been rather windblown recently we were very relieved that you could hardly tell it was blowing 20+ knots beyond them!

Oinoussa

Oinoussa, once upon a time supported a prosperous seafaring community, but nowadays it only had one small village, Mandraki, which, for a change isn’t full of white washed properties, but rather elegant homes indicating something of a renaissance for the island! In the height of the season we would have been lucky to grab a space on the quay, for all the large luxury motor yachts that flock here, fortunately for us, this isn’t classed as the height of the season!

Our first afternoon we spent first visiting the Port Police, what else, having a quiet beer, exploring this little cute village, with its inoperative swimming pool and miniature fishing boats, and finally watching the sun go down on this tranquil haven!

We had planned to stay here only a couple of nights and then head across to Chios Town, but had been warned that in these winds this was by far the safest place to be with a yacht, so we simply relaxed a little, met a lovely Australian couple, Matthew & Rachel, and a German couple, Isobel & Marcos, with the biggest challenge having no electricity, with limited water on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when the taps were turned on for a couple of hours!

We did break up our stay by walking to the other side of the island to see the Monastery, which turned out to be a nunnery. It seems all closed up when we arrived, until a tiny hatch in the large black iron door suddenly popped open and a wizen old lady popped her head out. She took one look at what we were wearing, muttered something we had no idea about & closed the hatch. We thought at that moment in time that our 55 minute hilly walk was to come to nothing except the scenery, when suddenly the main door open and she reappeared with a long skirt for me, and even a pair of trackie bottoms for David.. for a minute I thought he was going to have to where a skirt, which tickled my sense of humour! Suitably covered we were then invited in to have a wander in the tranquility of its walls.

The Scenery

The Monastery/Nunnery

The following day, with no sign that the winds were going to let up, we decided we catch the daily ferry over to Chios, to hire a car, explore and stay overnight… and so set about organising everything and the following morning we got up early to catch the 7am ferry across. Chios is for the next blog of course, all we can say now is we had a wonderful day and evening there, but as the winds got ever stronger overnight, they threatened to not run the ferry the next morning, leaving us stranded, so we were very relieved that it did, albeit a little earlier than expected, even though I really wasn’t looking forward to the crossing, you know me and ferries!

Suffice to say we were mightily relieved to be back with our yacht as the winds start to strengthen.

We did also take the opportunity to check out both the port and the disused. well unfinished marina on Chios, to see if it was safe for us to go to, as it would take a few miles of our next leg. The Port, well that was a definite no no with wind waves in the harbour, but the marina, whilst windy was safe enough, so having returned back to Oinoussa, we then set sail on the 19th July for the 10 miles across and moored alongside there, to further wait out the winds so we could cross the Aegean to Tinos, some 70 miles south west of us.

19th July 2022