Next after Alonnisos was Skopelos Island, just a couple of hours sail away. We went for the main harbor, called Skopelos. Skopelos is clearly the greenest island we have seen all year. There are several springs high up in the mountains which feed into small reservoirs from where the water goes to irrigate the vegetation all over the island. The harbor and town were most attractive - with really good restaurants as well!

The Admiral had the great idea to hire a guide and go for a hike, which we did. At a very modest cost, a very nice English woman by the name Heather Parsons took us for a 3 hour hike up the mountains on trails we would have never found by ourselves. In fact, Heather has a team of volunteers who maintain those trails yet they were pretty overgrown in places. We saw where Pierce Brosnan stayed when they filmed the “Mama Mia” movie. We saw a nice local monestary (Sotira) occupied by just one priest. And we learned a lot about Skopelos where Heather has lived for 30 years and about Greece. One thing I always wondered about is why there are so many churches in Greece. Heather offered two reasons. First, a young man who wants to become a priest will have all his debts forgiven! He can marry and have children even, although doing so means he will not be promoted within the Orthodox Church. So becoming a priest is a necessity if you’re downing in credit card debt! Second, under the rules of the Orthodox Church, it’s not a good thing to have the dead be buried in an open air cemetery - they need to be buried in a church. With space in public churches being limited, all families who can afford it will have their own private church somewhere - although it’s not necessary to employ a priest there. These are pretty small churches typically.

Our second day in Skopelos we hired a car - although I say “we” and I should have said “Lina.” This is because on Skopelos, the chief of police forces all rental agencies to require an International Drivers Permit from the renter - unless the renter has a EU issued drivers license. Since I do not have such a permit and have not seen my German drivers license in at least 40 years, Lina got a lot of driving practice! And it was good practice on alpine roads with phantastic views. The island is probably the most photogenic we’ve seen in Greece so it’s understandable that it’s used as a movie set at times. See the picture of the church featured in “Mama Mia.” Skopelos was possibly our favorite island this year.

From Skopelos, we had a couple of longer stretches of sailing to get to Olympic Marina near Athens. We checked off a couple of additional islands, Skyros and Andros. In Skyros we anchored in a nice bay next to the main town and took the dinghy in to do some exploring. We never went ashore on Andros - just anchored off the harbor of Patsi. We had not planned to go to Andros at all but when we tried to anchor in Kastri Bay on the island of Evia, we could not get the anchor set. We tried three times with our super-heavy Spade anchor and once with our second anchor, the Buegel, but whenever we put load on the anchor with the engine in reverse, it started sliding at higher rpm’s. (I typically go to 1500 rpms, which in forward gear gets Kincsem going at 8 knots.) Every time we brought the anchor up, it came with a huge bush of seaweed, even though we had lowered it in a sandy spot, at least that’s what we thought. Obviously, what looked like sand was something else altogether and the anchor slid a long way into the next grassy spot. By the time we had tried four times, it was getting late and in addition, the wind was now piping 20kn almost into Kastri Bay. So we gave up and sailed to Patsi on Andros instead, where the anchor set on the first try and we spent a quiet night next to a French boat.

We’ve now arrived in Olympic Marina near Cape Sounion. It’s a nice enough place but mostly home to boats of Athens owners, so pretty empty of people during the week. We’re now cleaning Kincsem and are getting her ready to be hauled out in a couple of days to spend the balance of July and August on the hard. That’s safer and much cheaper than keeping her in the water doing the high season here.