Our plan was to sail from Syros to Tinos. We navigated it to be 80 miles, which if we figured would be about 20 – 21 hours. The weather was showing 5 knots of wind and I think everyone was looking forward to a relaxing motor sail with a lot of reading and just sitting in the sun.
Things don’t always go as planned.
I went down for my morning nap and slept like a baby. It was great. The swell was starting to pick up a little bit, but we were sailing and things looked fine. Then the wind started picking up. When it hit 25 knots we decided to put a reef in the main and when it hit 29 we put a second reef in the main and pulled in most of the head sail. With this wind also came the swell and the start of my sea sickness.
This was the point I should’ve taken a Dramamine but I waited and by the time I took it, it was too late. I spent the majority of the sail horizontal and trying to get my stomach back down where it belonged. The thing about sea sickness is when you are just nauseous sometimes it’s better to get full on sick because if you don’t it lasts… and lasts… and even when the seas calm down a little bit it takes a lot to shake it.
We slowed down to around 1.8 knots and the wind was right on our nose… of course. The boat was being rocked off course and the auto pilot was haven’t trouble keeping up. We weren’t making very much headway at all, but there isn’t a whole lot between Skyros and Tinos so we decided to just keep going and get there in the day or three is was going to take.
Our diet was made up of crackers. The crackers in Europe are hit or miss. We have had the best Ritz made in Italy and Gran Pavasi crackers which are like saltines and we have had the worse crackers ever made. This time we struck out and had these terrible crackers. Mom tried one and didn’t say anything so when I bit into it and made the face of disgust all she could do was laugh. We later found it printed on the box that they were supposed to be cheese flavored crackers, which made a little bit more sense, but didn’t help the taste at all. And it wasn’t the taste so much as the after taste that really got us all. So we had what we refer to as “Crappy Cheesy Crackers” and some super hot salami that we didn’t realize was hot until we started eating it. That was lunch and dinner.
I took the first sleep since the Dramamine was kicking my butt and managed to sleep on the “couch” benches down below but woke up drenched in sweat. We couldn’t open any windows since it was so rough out so I was down there with the heat of the engine that had been running for 12 hours. It was less than pleasant but I managed to sleep some anyway.
Dad came down and woke me up early for my watch because he needed help watching ships. As it turned out we were going through a straight that empties from Athens so we were basically in a shooting gallery. There were 7 ships on radar when I woke up and one of them was passing in front of us .5 miles. Dad was getting turned around, which happens in the dark a lot, and just needed an extra pair of eyes. Mom had gone down for her sleep time and I ended up staying up on deck to assist until it was my watch.
I was still pretty sick on my watch and since there was no horizon I looked at the stars. That was the best part of this trip. The stars didn’t move and were a constant which was great and there were so many of them. I saw two shooting stars and really enjoyed getting my mind off of the rocking boat. Sadly I did have to keep looking out at the water and checking the radar which would bring me and my stomach back to the rocking at hand, but was necessary. I had seen a ship very close to land and watched it as we passed it for a good 20 minutes. It wasn’t moving and I figured it was anchored our or just hanging out at the dock. I was wrong. It was a ferry and it left right as we were passing its path. When I went down below to see how long we had and if we had enough space I saw it was going 20 knots and was going to pass us with .25 miles of space which isn’t enough at all. I felt terrible but I woke Dad up to come on deck and help me make sure it wasn’t on a collision course. He had avoided one earlier in the night apparently and we didn’t want to risk that again. He adjusted our course and we missed it by .5 miles but could see it right off the bow of our boat. This ferry wasn’t slowing down for anything. We got the wake from that too and Mom came up to start her watch early.
The sun came up a few hours later and the waves started to calm down some. We were approaching a “fork” in the water where we would either go to Tinos or just continue the extra 10 miles to Mykonos. After reviewing the Greek Waters Pilot we voted to just go to Mykonos since we were familiar with the marina and the Tinos harbor looked tiny. We didn’t want to get there and have to turn around and go somewhere else. So we went the extra hour and a half to get to Mykonos.
What was supposed to be a 20 hour trip turned out being a 28 hour trip to a completely different island.
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