A few days ago in Rhodes, my father, my sister Friederike and her husband Benno joined me for a few weeks. A good opportunity to explore Rhodes and that we did. The town is actually very nice because so much of it is old and well preserved or restored. The entire old town is encircled by a beautiful old wall and much of the town buildings go back many hundreds of years. There are large trees everywhere giving nicely shaded areas even in the newer parts of town. Rhodes is one of the prime tourist destinations in Greece and the tourism trade was definitely humming when we were there. But nonetheless, there’s so much to see that it’s fascinating all the same. We also rented a car to explore other parts of the island, particularly Lindos down the East Coast. Lindos is a small touristy village with a large ancient acropolis on top.

By the way, my pictures of this year’s trip are on Smugmug - follow the link https://joergesdorn.smugmug.com/Kincsem/2018/. Password is Seahorse.

First stop after Rhodes was Simi. In most harbors on the Greek Islands, nobody cares where you tie up as long as you are not in the way of the ferry. There’s usually nobody to collect any fees either. Here, there’s the “mooring man.” He will exert his authority when you enter the inner harbor, blowing his loud whistle and pointing out where he wants you to moor. For us, that meant between two boats of the four that had previously tied up on the long and otherwise empty West side of the harbor - all stern-to, of course. There was plenty of space elsewhere but we had to be fender to fender, I guess. He will also take your stern lines and then reappear in the evening and ask for his due. In our case, it was Euro 15 and he did not show up the second day at all - so E 7.50 per day!! He will also remind you to check in with the port police. That’s all the way around the harbor, a long walk. Luckily, I have 2 bikes on the boat which reduces this exercise to a 5 minute bike ride. I find the resident police officer sitting on the stone stairs in front of this office and having a coffee with some woman. He was not amused to see me and gave me the “quick and dirty” once-over. Didn’t want to see the passport, boat registration, or insurance - which I always have to show in other places. But he stamped the Greek “transit log” and the crew list 3 times each! I was out of there in less than 5 minutes, definitely a record. I have to go through this at every port in Greece, except at those where I don’t. No rime or reason for when I don’t have to do this. Greek bureaucracy.

Simi is a phantastic place. I could stay here for a week and just observe the goings on. The place is picturesque like Portofino where we were last year, albeit less high end (by comparison, the mooring fee in Portofino was over Euro 200 per day if I recall correctly). Ferries come in from all kinds of places and moor stern to on the pier. Some of them stay for the day to permit passengers to sightsee, others are only there for a few minutes and bring cars, trucks and overnight tourists. One of them is so big that it hardly fits into the long and narrow harbor sideways - it can’t use its anchor at all. So it goes backwards on the engine and has the bow thruster running all the time to compensate for the wind. And it’s out of there in 15 minutes. All those ferries spill out a lot of tourists, many of them only for a few hours. All big ferries moor on the outer end of the West pier. So every man, woman, child, car, moped and truck that goes on or off the big ferries has to come by the very narrow cobbled street on the West pier right behind Kincsem where we are moored. Lots of noise, lots to see. Fun for a day but now we want some quiet!