We left Finike and a lot of new friends behind (for the time being) with the plan of hightailing it to Kos and a rendezvous with our new rudder which has now arrived in Kos. It’s 200 – 300 miles from Finike, so this was going to be a multi-day trip – Kastellorizou, Rhodes, Symi and then Kos.

Kastellorizou

The small island of Kastellorizou is just a stone’s throw from Kas, Turkey. It turned out to be a 35 mile long, slow (must have lots of hull fouling) and boring motorboat ride, but arrival back in Greece was splendid! What a very pretty little town – and an easy place to deal with the paperwork of getting back into Greece.

We spent two nights anchored in Kastellorizou but left early (05:30 – still dark!) for the long 75 mile trip to Rhodes. We intentionally picked a light wind day to ease strain on the rudder and were expecting another long motorboat ride so it was a bonus when the wind came up and by 08:30 we were sailing at 7 knots!

The wind was up and down quite a lot, so we got to play with the spinnaker some, motorsailed some and sailed with the white sails too, managing to keep the speed up and arrived outside Rhodes by 16:30. I contacted George the harbormaster who immediately suggested we not come in as he was expecting significant wind from a direction which would make the harbor difficult! This was unexpected! With no other viable options, we decided to press on to Symi – another 25 miles – aiming for a very protected looking anchorage at Panormitis.

Symi

We sailed for as long as we could, but ended up motoring in order to keep our speed up. We rounded the south west corner of Simi in the dark and managed our way into the very narrow entrance in what would have been pitch black if it wasn’t for the monstrously illuminated monastery! The anchor went down at 20:41 – one of our latest arrival times. It had been a long long day!

The following day we did nothing!

Since there’s not much here at Panormitis other than a large monastery, we decided to move around to the east coast – which would have better protection from coming westerly winds. We had a nice sail into Pedi where we were the only boat at anchor.

Pedi is delightful – but pretty much closed in the pre-season. The town of Symi is just over the hill and though a bus is available to take us between Pedi and Symi, we only managed to catch it once – but the walk was interesting – up and down back steps through the towns.

We departed Simi with a light forecast – which turned out to be wrong and we were sailing upwind towards Rhodes with reefed main and jib! As we approached the coast of Rhodes – a good deal west of our planned berth at Mandraki harbor – the sky got threatening and then a major thunderstorm started. We almost managed to out-run it – but as we made the final turn into Mandraki it overtook and drenched us!

We managed to get into the harbor without any problems and George had us tie alongside close to the harbor entrance – we were in Rhodes!

We’re still in Rhodes and have a car booked for a couple of days exploring… next chapter…