Walk/Swim/Sail One Hundred and Twenty – Leonidhion to Astrous

Straight up the coast to Astrous a busy little Greek family holiday resort, passing windmills precariously clinging to cliffs, anchoring for lunch, swimming and snorkelling. Very little wind until later on when it picked up and we reached nearly 8 knots. A sudden change in wind direction whilst I was below (and thus the boat heeling over at an extreme angle) meant that I was desperately catching things falling out of lockers and got trapped behind the dining table. Xavier, who was below with me, amused us all saying ‘It’s an emergency Mummy, you’ll have to use the walkie talkie!’
We scared Keith, the flotilla skipper, by giving him the impression that we were going to sail straight into Astrous harbour, however we pulled the sails down and moored up where he directed us to, at the end of the stone jetty at the harbour entrance. By this time there was a huge swell and we were bouncing up and down. Three more flotilla boats were moored up side-to-side and further in. The next boat that came in was tied up to us. However there was a terrible bumping and crashing of boats. Their stern line (a rope over an inch thick) snapped and bent up our fairlead (a metal thing for putting the rope through). The cleat (another metal thing) also looked at risk. Eventually Ben, the rookie egineer, agreed they needed to be moved before they pulled our boat apart.
The boat, although bouncing up and down violently, was now quite safe so we took the dinghy across the harbour to the beach on the other side. I decided to swim back to the boat from the beach as my ‘One Mile’ exercise. It was impossible to draw the view from the boat as it was bouncing up and down so much, so I clambered onto the sea wall and drew from there. The castle at the top of the hill was completely obscured by masts in this position so I had to choose the church instead.