Cyclades Regatta 2018: Kimolos island saves the day
Day five of the 2018 Cyclades Regatta, race leg three.
After one-and-half rest days on Milos, the Giorgio crew were raring to take their positions for the 20-nautical mile race from the Cycladic isle’s Adamas port to nearby little-known Kimolos island.
Twenty measly miles. It’ll be a breeze, we thought.
We’ll be there in four hours, five hours max, cooling off with a post-race celebratory swim in the deep clear waters of Kimolos’ little port of Psathi by the early afternoon.
Well, we thought wrong.
It started off promising enough, as the start horn blared for each category between 11:00 and 11:30.
We were off and racing in brisk northerly winds of some 10 to 12 knots flowing steadily through Milos’ wide sheltered natural harbour.
What a thrill to view the boat houses at the traditional fishing village of Klima and Milos’ capital Plaka, whose whitewashed homes wrap around a rocky hill, from the sea as we raced.
We sailed northwest out of the harbour and then the wind started to drop off. All boats slowed right down.
A cruise ship passed by on its way to moor at Adamas, honking its horn, joined by fast ferries flying in and out of the harbour.
We literally had the wind knocked out of our sails. Groundhog day on the water.
The first race leg of the regatta, between Kea and Milos, was heartbreakingly void of wind.
It was becoming a little ridiculous.
Come on, just give us a little wind so we can move this 40-foot baby!
Giorgio is a cruiser not (really) a racer, a lover not a fighter. So, he’s not so light. We actually nicknamed him the Love Boat as he nurtured such good relations between crew members.
Inching ever so slowly into open sea, we reached a rock islet named Akratha, just south of the harbour exit.
Giorgio literally put on the brakes and we watched that islet – which we dubbed the Island of Hell - for what seemed like hours on end, as we bobbed up and down like a rubber duck in the bathtub.
Blip, blip, blip, blip. Surely, the temperature of the deep cobalt sea was tepid, though we would have preferred to be in it rather than looking at it.
At one point, a couple of boat crews found themselves dangerously close to the sharp, rocky coast of the islet but, thankfully, they were able to unstick themselves.
We had the spinnaker hoisted but it just hung there, doing little but flapping back and forth uselessly.
We could see Kimolos clearly in front of us, however, we needed to first reach Monastiri Cape - at its northern tip. It was still a very long way off.
Then, suddenly, a burst of wind appeared from out of nowhere and caught us unawares.
We all snapped into position and the gust was so strong that I found myself having difficulties trimming the spinnaker pole, pulling it away from the forestay.
Whooping a little with joy as we surfed the Aegean, the fun didn’t last long. Within about 10 minutes, the knots had dropped and so did our speed.
At 17:30, after at least six hours of searching for wind, we ran the numbers and took a crew decision to abandon the race.
There was no way we would make it to the finish, at Psathi port, within our time limit.
Monitoring our competitors with Greek-designed ship tracking service MarineTraffic, via AIS trackers attached to each boat, we saw that several other crews had already given up the ghost.
Just one boat terminated. It was Cosmote Erytos 2, in the ORC International class, skippered by Kostas Manthos.
The Erytos crew managed to round Monastiri Cape and, from there, took hold of decent northerly winds, passing the finish line and entering Psathi.
The next day was a rest day, so we took full advantage of it to spend some time checking out Kimolos’ beaches.
The most energetic crew members took a dip at the beach in Psathi, one of the few island ports where it’s clean enough to swim, and we all wolfed down a long, lazy breakfast at a seafront café.
All crews met up at Prassa beach, in the northeast, which is considered the isle’s most beautiful beach.
Fine white sand and shallow, aquamarine waters, it felt like a tropical hideaway. We finally had a proper swim.
At 36 square kilometres in size, Kimolos is not exactly tiny, yet it’s easy to navigate its few yet spectacular beaches.
On our way back to the main town, Chorio, we stopped at Goupa Kara, where boat houses like those on Milos, are built into the rock face.
From there, we jumped into deep turquoise waters and swam out to explore two rock islets known as Revmatonisia.
The day concluded at tamarisk-lined Kalamitsi beach with flash-fried seafood meze and plenty of laughs at a taverna run by a fellow sailor from our Athens club who happens to hail from the island.
As the sun set, we looked around us and across at the traditional village of Pollonia on Milos and completely forgot that we didn’t even place in the race.
Videography by Carlo Raciti
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