ANCHORING AND MOORING!
Today we sailed only a short distance from the achorage of Nisis Pragonisi to Poros Island. Edit and Peter liked to chill and relax and do nothing except swimming, reading, and enjoying the time. We could use the mooring ball from Mark and Marijke from Greatcircle which was really nice. Then Marijke called me with bad news. I first thought we could not use their mooring ball because Nicole and Michael from the Tama may arrived earlier and they would use the ball for a longer time. But this was not the case. She called me to say that a few days back Micael died from a heart attack. I could not believe it. It was only a week ago that we had dinner together and we would see each other in Greece to sail around a bit together. Horrible news. Maybe because of the bad news we suddenly had a line in our prop and not only a little bit. First Edit went in to see if she could untangle it but it was very bad. Robbert dived for about 15 minutes to get the line out but it worked! It felt like steel the line as the dyneema had been twisted for many times! Anyway, that was done. We continued our sail to Poros under perfect conditions. Wind and sunshine. What else more? 

So now we needed to moor the boat for the first time. Edit had did this before and she would show me how to do it. We had a bit of struggle to get then buy up but we managed and we clicked the shackle on top of the buoy. That did not last very long and paaanggggg …. it broke off the bouy! Now we understood that we had to use the line under the buoy instead on top of the buoy … so we did. And now we were ok. Not too difficult but good to know how to do it!

When we had a drink we went into town to see how it looks like and buy a new buoy. It was ready a few hours later even with the name of Greatcircle on it! We had great time in Poros. We went to 2 beautiful bays, had lunch and dinners, gt’s, wines and lots of fun and talks. And we lost our boat from the anchor!

EIGHT ON THE RUN!

When having lunch I suddenly saw the boat moving forward with 2 people running around on board. I was shocked! They were moving our boat! We went out with the dinghy immediately to see what was going on. And it appeared that the anchor did not hold anymore and the was floating in the direction of the rocks. 2 American gentleman from a boat close by saw it happen and went to rescue our boat. Boy oh boy, again I was shocked. This is something I found very difficult to handle to be honest. But everything went well and Eight was on anchor again. Then we did the mathematics on how this could happen. And we found that the chain was not correctly been …… instead of 100 meters we had 134 meters. A big difference! Also we found that we needed more chain as we already lost 4/5 from where the anchor comes out to the roller in the front. Anyway, than we found out that we needed to apply a totally different formula than we used to do … Anyway, a scary lesson learned, but you have to learn the hard way, don’t you?!

POROS
Poros is an island in the Saronic Gulf, administratively it belongs to the province of Attica. Poros is only 23 km2 in size and has around five thousand permanent residents. It is located near the Peloponnese coast, just opposite the town of Galatas. Poros actually consists of two islands, Sferia and Kalavria. Sferia is the smallest island, it is a volcanic island, on which is built the largest part of the capital Poros city. The larger island, Kalavria, is the fertile, beautifully overgrown part of Poros. There is a narrow channel between the two islands and the two islands are connected by a bridge.   Poros is a romantic island, an island of tranquility. The island is often covered with pine trees, olive trees and lemon trees. The pine trees extend to the rugged coasts and sandy beaches of the island. The most photographed landmark on Poros is the historic tower clock, at the top of the hill. The tower bell is located between pine trees and fig fig trees. From above you have an excellent view of the city and the opposite coast of Peloponnese. Poros town is very lively, on the coast you see many neoclassical buildings. When you walk through the narrow alleys, you see white houses and bougainvilleas everywhere. In the town, which is built on the slopes of a hill, there are nice, traditional tavernas and kafeneions. There are also many souvenir shops, bars, jewelers and boutiques. The archaeological museum on Korizi square is certainly worth a visit. Here you can see objects from the temple of Poseidon and of Ancient Trizina. In the southeast of Poros are the monasteries of Kalavria and of Zoodochou Pigis of Poros that were built in 1713. Poros can ideally serve as a base for exploring the entire area, including the Argo-Saronic islands (Aegina, Hydra, Agkistri, and Spetses), the Argolis district of the Peloponnese (Epidavros, Nafplion, Mycene etc) and of course Athens.