Poros & Gulf of Hydra

We left Piraeus on Weds 20/6 and after an overnight stop in a bay on Aigina Island went to Poros – a small Island separated from Peloponnisos by a very narrow channel and with several beautiful bays for anchoring. Here we had several very relaxing days just anchored, swimming and exploring the local coastline in the dinghy. Its quite hard to find a nice remote beach here. Nearly all beaches have makeshift tavernas on them with loud music blaring and every square metre covered in deck chairs, so most of our swimming is just done off the boat.
Poros was settled in the 7th century BC but although its quite picturesque there is nothing to be seen of any ancient ruins. In the narrow channel there are numerous smallish ferries of about 30 feet bringing day trippers from Galatas on the other side and one of them nearly caused a disaster. We were coming down the channel and a ferry was approaching us on our port bow, on a course where the ferry would pass us closely on our port side. Suddenly the ferry changed course to port directly across our bow. We had to turn hard to port ourselves and missed ramming the ferry amidships by only a few metres !
Normally you should turn to starboard to avoid a collision but we couldn’t as we were too close to the shore on starboard side.
The ferry captain and passengers seemed oblivious to the near disaster and gaily waved to us as we passed closely by. Needless to say we’re now treating all ferries with huge caution.
We cruised down the coast of Hydra island where it would have been interesting to go ashore to the town of Hydra, but there are no anchorages there so we kept going and anchored at a very large and sheltered bay called Ormos Skindos.
We came back to Zea marina, Piraeus on Weds 27th so the Naiad stabilizer engineers could start work on the 28th. Once again it was extremely hot in the marina – high 30s but has now “cooled down” to low 30s. Sharon & Doug arrive tomorrow and we’ll do some sight seeing in Athens with them before heading off through the Cyclades and Dodecanese island groups, probably to end up in Kos by the end of July.
1714 miles covered to date in 116 days on board.
Technical: I put this section separately and last as I realize not everyone’s interested – only boating aficianados ! The only real issue currently is the hydraulic stabilizers and it has been difficult to get the engineers to start as here its like NZ in mid December – everybody wanting jobs done. Last Thursday an engineer removed the Hydraulic Pump assembly and the pulleys off the engine and took it away for testing. Their proposed solution is to increase the number of pulleys and drive belts from 2 to 3 and this does make sense. They are also going to try and go to a slightly larger pulley size. However, its not clear when they can do this by and we want to leave here about Wednesday. So we may elect to move on and either have their engineer travel to us or return to Piraeus at a quieter time. The stabilizers are great to have but we also have the paravanes anyway.