Fri 12 Jul and Sat 13 Jul – Paros

Friday

Somehow we must have gotten used to sleeping in a washing machine as we both woke up on Friday morning relatively fresh considering how rolly it’d been. There was still a bit of northerly wind blowing but that was forecast to die down by lunchtime. So we decided to use the residual wind to sail the 20 miles to Paros, the next island to the east of Sifnos. Upped the anchor, waved our Italian friends good bye and off we went. We knew that it would be a windy and somewhat rocky sail across, but what we found when we left exceeded our expectations, to put it mildly. The wind was blowing 25 knots, and the sea state was nothing short of awe-inspiring. We tucked in two reefs, put on the live jackets and ploughed on. It was a wild sail across with an average of 6.5 knots across a nervous and twitchy sea. A few times we crashed into the waves so hard that Bini came to a complete halt, with green water washing across the deck and cockpit.

Exhausted, covered in salt but happy we dropped the hook in Paroikia, a protected bay on the north west coast of Paros. We had a quick lunch and passed out for a much needed nap before heading over to see Phil and another boat friend of his for a few drinks. This is one of my favourite aspects of sailing, so many nice people to hang out with! We finished the day with a fantastic dinner, looking across the bay and sharing our food with a few very handsome Aegean street cats.

Saturday

Saturday morning – workout day! Running in this heat is close to impossible, although you see a few nutters running in the boiling mid day sun. Our only chance to get a run in is before ten, so we got up early, put on our running gear and took the dinghy to the beach. Camilla had found us a nice run around the bay, with Google Maps classifying the route as “mostly flat”. Now I don’t know if Google Maps engineers all live in the mountains, but just as we turned the first corner all that we could see was one hill on top of the next. We managed to climb/run halfway across the bay before turning around and finishing our run along the flat side of the beach. I can honestly say that this was the hardest run I had in a veeeery long time. We rewarded ourselves with a nice breakfast, in which we were joined by the cutest little kitten, climbing over us, our table, our food. 

Before starting to make our way through the list of chores we had a little walk into town. There is a somewhat famous “church of 100 doors” that we had to check out. I didn’t really count, but I would bet there are no more than 20 doors in this church., ts ts ts. Next up we did a water run using our newly acquired water bladders. We can now haul 60 litres of water in one run – YEAH! We even managed to get some laundry done, rinse all the salt off Bini and do a provisioning run, all in one day!