Skopelos...what can I say? Wow, wow and wow again. We've loved the Greek Islands and almost each one we've seen we've fallen in love with, but Skopelos tops them all. It hasn't been spoilt by the filming here of Mama Mia - you'd have expected hordes and hordes of visitors to be descending on these shores, but it's still sleepy and unspoilt. Yes, you do see signs to "The Mama Mia Church" and a few of the posters refer to the movie but that's about it. Oh, and loads of the locals met the cast and crew and have photos up in their cafes and shops to prove it, but that's about it in terms of cashing in.
We had a glorious trip across from Skiathos and nosed into a few pretty white coves before finding our anchorage at Panormos, which was as beautiful as any anchorage we've been in over the past six summers. This early in the season, there were few other boats around when we got there, and I had my first swim to take lines to shore (not my first swim of the season, but the first one to do my chore, and somehow the water always feels colder when you have to go in, rather than want to!)
As dusk fell, a few other yachts joined us in the anchorage, but clearly everyone else was enjoying the peace and tranquility of this special place and it was a quiet night in every respect - no noise from other boats, no wave noise on the hull. I think we could happily have just stayed there, tied to shore and sheltered from the wind, for the rest of the season and still come home with big smiles on our faces in the autumn, but the forecast suggested we may need a day or two in port.
Skopelos Town didn't disappoint. As we get nearer to Turkey, the Greek style changes a little, and this was a mixture of the white houses expected in a Greek island, with plenty of wooden balconies in the Turkish style, plus of course a beautiful church in a prominent position over the sea. The harbourmaster welcomed us and gave us a great berth, side-to on the quay in front of the restaurants.
We hired another quad and off we went on our land explorations. It's hard to adequately describe the views; breath-taking is so over-used, but as we came around the corner of a narrow, windy road, with a warm breeze in our faces, to see a great swathe of the coastline laid out before us, bright white half moon bays and tiny inaccessible coves, the sea sparkling with a million fragments of sunlight and the distant islands bathed in a violet haze, well, it WAS simply breath-taking.
We headed for the Mama Mia church but had to laugh when we got there. Most of it is exactly as you'd expect: that towering hill with the steep, curving staircase up the side, the sensational view, the rocky outcrop where Meryl Streep belts out "The Winner Takes it All" and the church on top...but hang on, it's a different church! Some artistic licence and cinematic trickery has removed the church that is actually there (a rather simple edifice by Greek standards) with a prettier and slightly larger version! Having climbed all of those 200 steps leading from bottom to top, you rather expect to find Amanda Seigfreid on her donkey and Piers Brosnan about to get down on one knee. Instead we found a handful of tourists taking selfies or sitting in the shade to get their breath back before the climb back down.
We stayed for three nights in Skopelos and just loved it, but with deadlines approaching for a flight home, we wanted to see more of the Sporades and everyone told us that Alonissos was gorgeous so off we want for the short hop between the two islands. We spent a couple of nights at anchor in different islands off Alonissos, the first in a quiet bay with just a couple of goats for company, the second in an almost perfectly sheltered pool with a narrow entrance channel widening out into a substantial piece of water, where we shared the anchorage with a dozen or so yachts (we seem to be the only motorboat around at this time of year, which is a shame for all the others, as you get some of the best cruising before the height of the season.) With a westerly wind due, we returned to Alonissos and found a tiny inlet with room for just one boat and promptly took the only parking space available, tying a rope to each side of the bay and claiming it for ourselves. The only signs of human life we saw for 24 hours were the occasional boats going past the entrance to the bay...heaven!
The main port of Alonissos is pretty small, but we opted to go in for a night or two, partly because we wanted to visit the chora, or old town, perched on the hill above. We had been told to go on the main quay, but as Frank tried to manoeuvre Zaffina into the space indicated, it was clear that we were bigger than the gap, so we ended up tied on near the ferry port - not the nicest place to be. The weather was changing and after a night in the port, we made the trip by taxi up to the town, but whilst we were exploring this pretty little place, black clouds suddenly gathered and a strong wind blew up from nowhere. We wanted to go back to the shelter of Skopelos harbour, as we knew we were in for a blast, so we abandoned our explorations and belted back down to the port to ready Zaffina for the short trip back, but the fates were against us. As we tried to lift the anchor, we discovered that the yacht next to us had laid their anchor across ours, and so the two came up together off the sea bed. I tried for a while - unsuccessfully - to disentangle the two chains, but eventually a fishing boat came over and with a lot of shouting and gesticulations, managed to release the rogue anchor and we could finally depart (we had notified the port authorities of the problem, so they could advise the yacht owners who were away from their boat).
Things weren't too bad when we came out of port and were in the shelter of the island but once we turned into the channel separating Skopelos from Alonissos...urgh! The best thing I can say about that trip is that it was short, no more than 40 minutes once we hit the rough seas, but everything else about it was pretty ghastly. Cutlery and crockery shrieked and tried to break out from cupboards and drawers, pots and pans rattled and the wine cupboard door flew up and half a dozen bottles shot across the floor of the saloon. The computer leapt from table to floor and it was only by a miracle that my beautiful fruit bowl from Hvar wasn't smashed into a thousand pieces. Zaffina was, as ever, brilliant, (and the skipper was pretty good...) but it is a trip we'd rather forget and an enormous relief to finally reach the shelter of the harbour. We were guided to the same berth that we'd left a few days previously and tied on in the now pouring rain with a multitude of ropes. Although the wind dropped shortly after we arrived (yeah, I was annoyed about that!) it blew up again in the night and blew and blew and blew, so despite the horrible crossing, we knew we'd made the right decision in seeking the best shelter to sit it out.
We were back to sea three days later, with probably our longest open sea trip of the season ahead of us. We had to get to Lesvos in the eastern Sporades, as we'd made arrangements to leave our Azimut there whilst we flew home, so on Saturday we eased out of port and were relieved to be on a completely different sort of sea from the last one we'd crossed! This was a beautiful millpond, and our trip to Skyros (not to be confused with Siros, the capital of the Aegean...) was pretty good. There's not much to see on Skyros, it's very much off the beaten track, rather barren and not the most picturesque island but we anchored in a pleasant bay for the day and found a sheltered cove for the night before continuing out journey. Conditions were even better the following morning, and apart from a blip half way, the trip was stunning. The only the we lacked was dolphins. The blip? Well, as we were gently cruising along, the starboard engine suddenly and briefly lost power. Frank and I looked at one another in horror: we had this problem two years ago and it led to one of our most unpleasant journeys, from Montenegro to Corfu, with frequent losses of power as the wind and sea rose around us. Back then, it also took two weeks to fix the problem, but my brilliant husband had learnt from last time. He looked at me and just said "well, if it's the same thing, I think I know how they fixed it", and off he went down to the engine room. Five minutes later, we put Zaffina back up to full speed and continued our trip to Lesvos without another hitch! If only we'd had that same knowledge two years ago.
We anchored off the southeast corner of the island for the afternoon, and then eased up to the port of Mitilene. The marina is excellent, but our first impressions of the island and the town were less so, and these were only compounded when we hired a car the following day (wind was up again) and went off to explore. It wasn't pretty. However...some more excursions over the following two days proved to us that the first area we'd visited was the least attractive part of Lesvos, and when we found the heart of the town, we discovered it was far more appealing than the first impression had suggested. Lesvos has grown on us!
And it was from Lesvos that we returned home on Saturday, just as the financial storm was breaking over Greece. That morning, for the very first time, there were queues at the cash machine, as the reality of the situation really started to sink in, and with the banks having been closed for a week, it will be interesting to see how much things have changed when we return to Lesvos on Monday, and continue this fabulous summer of cruising.
