020: Sailing the Cyclades to Crete - Knossos Palace, Earthquakes, Dinosaurs and Minotaurs

The last blog was about returning from England and Woody’s experiences in Aegina – a visit to the Parthenon and witnessing a live sea rescue.

In this blog we leave Aegina and head down through Cyclades to Crete and beyond!

Our first stop was Russian Bay, a sheltered anchorage just outside Poros – a stopover before heading into open seas.

The wind was perfect for the first leg to Serifos and the kids loved riding the bow seat. The sea of the Cyclades – otherwise known as ‘sickly ladies’ – was as bumpy as its reputation

Serifos was quite a barren island from what we saw. Apparently there’s quite a few grumpy people living on the island and according to Rod Heikell’s book written in 2010, it’s got a freshly painted church.. woohoo!

The next day we headed for Folegandros – another seemingly barren Island until we swam ashore from our anchorage and did some exploring. Finding a lovely little swimming cove with aqua marine water.

It would have been nice to explore the Cyclades more but the wind was too good an opportunity to miss, so after a solar shower and dinner, we had an early night ready for our night passage to Crete.

It was a dark night but we had radar and AIS and the first night sail on our new boat was quite exciting – also a great opportunity to try out a watch system between the two of us. Woody watched the sun come up doing 7.5 – 8 knots with the wind on the beam – an incredible night’s sail with the prop gen keeping up with the autopilot, radar, batteries and fridge all the way.

We arrived in Heraklion four hours ahead of schedule – quite an industrial port – there is a marina but it’s not really set up for visiting yachts so we were on the town quay taking the full brunt of the swell from the large Ferries.

Next stop was the Palace of Knossos – famous for the Minotaur myth and bull running – where the bull charged towards children who had to flip over it for a challenge! Being an iconic, historical landmark we had to take our latest #Legoericka shot!

After that we went to the archaeological museum with original frescoes and artefacts from Knossos but not brilliant for kids so we went to the Natural History Museum instead. It had animatronic dinosaurs, an earthquake simulator and lots more interactive stuff. The guidebook said it closed at 8 but we were ejected at 6 so only got an hour – but still, we’d highly recommend it.

We had possibly the last gyros before leaving Greece – a sad moment for the kids.

It was a five o’clock start to Chania on the west side of Crete with some home schooling on the way. We had to pick up some crew who would help with the passage to Malta. We need to head to Tunisia to get some work done on the boat but it’s quite a big trip with just two parents on watch.

The kids got involved with sailing again and worked their way through some cool work books we bought at Knossos about the Minotaur, Crete and Greek mythology.

In light of the man overboard situation we had on the ferry and in trying to improve our safety equipment we got some OLAS tags from the UK. We hope to do a whole blog on safety equipment for kids – like lifejacket, buoyancy aids etc., very soon.

Chania was a pleasant surprise – a really nice little place where you could easily spend a whole week, but our aim was to pick up crew and head West asap.

Our old sailing friend Craig joined us along with Lisa from Brighton Marina Yacht Club who had never really done a long passage before but it turned out she was a teaching assistant so she really got stuck in helping with the home schooling.

We sailed right to the very West of Crete – a beautiful place called Gramvousa and we wouldn’t even have gone if we hadn’t been given an amazing treasure map from our friend Steve who buried treasure there about 20 years ago for a sailing magazine competition that never materialised.

From the anchorage we swam ashore then followed the instructions and clues but we couldn’t find the treasure – perhaps some of the landmarks were no longer there. Everyone was obviously disappointed but the treasure will be there to be found by someone else another day.

The next day we navigated our way through a very tricky area of rocks to start our passage to Malta.

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