A week on AnnaMaria on the Aegan Sea
Post date: 13-Sep-2009 18:19:26
"Step over the bar," Colin says while holding his camera and watching me duck under the railing. I fear that if I had stepped over instead of ducked under I would have fallen into the water already. My toes grip the slippery circular bar on the bow of AnnaMaria while my arms grip the railing behind me. Our skipper Ben is also waiting with his camera. I really hope I don't lose my bottoms or my top.
Our boat bobs up and down with the waves and I push off and plunge into the water displaying a perfect bow dive. I yank my bottoms back up and over my arse and pop my boobs back into my top as I emerge from the water.
There are 8 people on our boat including our skipper. The guys are outnumbered 5 to 3 by women. Ben is our skipper and he is from Oxford and the other male on board is from London. Angela is from Latvia but she is living in New York now. There are 3 girls from Ireland and I love their accent-Thersea, Louise and Louisa. Louisa has beautiful curly red hair so Colin got to see an Irish red head. Everyone is close to our age and we all get along great. We make an excellent crew on AnnaMaria. It's really a team effort to sail and is a lot of work to get the fenders on for docking and the sails up for sailing. Colin was really good at everything and learned really fast. I was better at some things than others. I did master the slip knot and the bowline knot, but it took a lot of practice to get them. I was good at coling the anchor line with a little metal bar. I spent two days at the helm steering the boat but Colin was better at that than I was. I was a bit of a drunken sailor and turned the boat too much to compensate for the waves. I wasn't good at planning ahead of the waves so there was a lot of back and forth and zig zag steering.
It was surprisingly easy to get used to the rocking off the boat and sleeping at night. It was very hot in our double bed cabin, so I preferred to sleep on the top deck, which we did once. We crashed at 2:00 AM after a wild Wednesday night at the bar. It was so great sleeping on top of the boat, it felt like we moved less and it was a little windy but not too bad. We tucked the fleecy blankets around us so that no air could get in. I thought we would be awake as soon as the sun came up but we slept until 8:30. The sun warmed our eyelids and was a nice contrast to the light wind. We wanted to sleep on the top deck again but there were two nights when it rained so we were glad we were not awakened by the rain.
On the second day, the sea was rough at 6/10 and there were massive waves. It didn't matter where you were sitting, you were sprayed. My brown shorts and green T-Shirt were stained with white salty patches by the end of the day. Colin was a bit sea sick. Drinking the night before and the waves make for a shaken martini in the stomach. Colin was busy being ill off the stern which was a bit less wavy. I was okay, but didn't think I was actually going to be sick. I was busy pulling the winch to let our smaller sail out. I just finished and then all of a sudden I was covering my mouth, spraying my hat and washing the deck with corn flakes and orange juice. Ben was laughing at me because I was apologizing about the deck as I was still puking over the shaky guard rail. The Irish girls commended me for diligently finishing my job before getting sick. I felt much better after I was sick, but I sat at the back of the boat and watched the land for the rest of the journey until lunch time. Our third day at sea was also a bit rought but we both took Gravel with our breakfast and then we were both fine the rest of the week.
We usually ate breakfast and lunch while we were on the boat. It was great to take turns cooking and cleaning up. The guy from London (I don't know how to spell his name) even caught us an Octopus! Ben beat Henry on the deck to make him tender. I guess calamari in Edmonton is always chewy because the octopus has not been betaen enough before we eat it. Ben also fried him with some lemon and oil and we enjoyed him for cocktail hour. We even made Mojitos a few nights on the boat.
It was really to get used to our routine on the boat. Each day we left the current island where we were docked and sailed to a private beach or great hidden gem location for swimming. Next, we sailed into our port for the night, explored the island and then had a group dinner with the 8 passengers onboard Vissilus. We'd come back to the boat for a night cap and then retire. Sailing is actually quite the busy life.
One of our favourite days at sea was when we went cliff diving. I was really nervous about going because to get to the cliff you had to swim through an underwater cave. I was a bit nervous about it but we borrowed some snorkel masks and Colin walked me through it. We took our 3 deep breaths like we usually do before we scuba dive and took the plunge. I tried to swim a metre down so I would not be near the top of the cliff, but my buoyant legs floated to the top of the cave and I was running out of oxygen. Therefore, I stupidly pushed off the side and scratched the back of my left calf and my right ankle. It was just a minor cut which the salt water helped to heal. After we were out of the cave we climbed the cliff and jumped off. It was like jumping off the cliff at Horseshoe Lake only it was much warmer.
In addition to my graceful puking, we also had an incident with a woman overboard. Poor Thersea was walking back from shopping and slipped on the plank and fell into the water between our boat and peer. It was lucky she escaped with a few bruises and cuts.
Colin and I enjoyed our last swim in the ocean from our boat to a beach with an abandoned tavern. We went inside the tavern and saw a 7up fridge, a corroded toilet and a rusting freezer. This tavern and one house further up the cliff were the only houses on this island. I was so tempted to say leave us here and we'll start a business and live on this private island. The island is located next to a fishing spot, so we could have customers for our tavern. Most people on these islands use windmills for power and make most of their money from tourists who visit by boat in the summer and then they have enough money to sustain them through the winter. Oh and winter just means rain, wind and about 10 degrees celsius . Most Greeks don't go out in that weather, but I think I could still swim in the ocean. When we landed in Samos, I felt not like I was visiting a new country on our 6 month trip but more like I was coming home. As Colin and I swim through the fresh aquarmarine Aegean sea, I think that I could definitely live here. Perhaps, we will retire in Greece on the island with the tavern.
Here's a map of all the islands we visited.
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