To Nisos Kos ! (Kos Island)

We are underway from the eastern most portion of the Med on our 3 day sail to Kos, with an overnight stop on Simi. This is the beginning of our Greek Island tour. As you can see, Jenée is very pleased, Katie is not. The first day at sea is always tough on our little fluff ball.

Ne (yes), happy she is not. Ever feel like sometimes you want to curl up in a ball and go hide - Katie too. She is self-hiding. She's employing the old paw over the eyeballs technique. Impressive.

We love the sunsets at sea. It was a pretty comfortable sail from Cyprus to Greece.

And our little girl is showing signs of life. Getting better.

After 2 days of sailing and 240 nautical miles, we arrive on Nisos Simi. We visited this beautiful little, mountain island last year and loved it. Here we are at a different anchorage, Panormittis, and we love it more. It's located on the southwest side of the island and is a well protected cove and the only residence is a Monastary. We'll assume Greek.

We were surprised to see more than a few boats but we loved the view.

Check out this early 4 AM shot. All the boats have their anchor lights on. Looks like a little city at night.

Daylight shines on the Monastary and the pine trees all around.

Even our little ball of joy is out. She is sitting on the boat fenders taking in the sights. Aren't we all happy? Welcome to my world. Excuse me while I clean my fingernails with a power drill.

This is a nice wide anchorage with a narrow entrance. A little tough to find but makes for a nice calm stay over. We slept well after 2 days at sea.

A final view of Ormos Panormittis (Panormittis Bay). Beautiful place. Like most (all?) Greek Islands, they are volcanic in origin and quite spectacular.

We sailed another 8 hours and arrived on Nisos Kos (Kos Island). We'll be on this island for a little bit, awaiting Jenée's brother Mike and wife Monica. (currently cruising the Med) OK by us, this place is cool.

We are at the southeastern part of Kos at a place called Kamares. The waterfront has many family owned Tavernas and the prices are the best we've seen so far. Jenée and I look incredible for this photo, darn sunlight! That's Jungle between us.

And that's a Mojito - Jenée's favorite drink. They made a good one here. The food was great and did I mention cheap?!

After dinner we strolled around town and met a few locals. As always, wonderful, friendly people.

The next day we sailed north to the little port of Kardamena. This was our opportunity to "clear in" to Greece. Unfortunately the port police here did not have the means to do so. So we sailed another 4 hours to the northern port of Kos Town. This is the old harbor, smack dab in the center.

A beautiful place indeed

This is part of an old fort which we'll walk through now to see what is on the other side. How old? Let's see, ... Um, carry the one, wait a minute .... Wicked old.

Through the doors, we find very nice outside restaurants for one ...

... With a nice view through the trees of 2500 year old ruins.

This is the old, old town of Kos, once a major trading area in these parts.

Everywhere you look, you see more and more flowering plants, and Tavernas.

We are actually trying to find the Port Police to officially check in. We are now coming back to the Kos Harbor.

Now off to customs to get our 2 month Greek cruising permit and log. This is how you get diesel for your boat. A small pickup truck sized "mini-tanker" pulls up to your boat and voila! This dude is more than happy to pose with his rig.
Efharisto!

While at customs we asked about the good restaurants in town. We were told Mummy's Kitchen was one of the best local Greek restaurants. The agent pulled out a map and pointed to the place. We're going tonight baby!

We're at Mummy's. Turns out, Mummy is the chef and her son is the maitre'd. He basically told us what to orr er for main course - one goat dish, one pork, perfect! This is an eggplant (called abergine) on top of thinly sliced potatoes with a garlic/yogurt topping. Wonderful. The suggestions came from a nice British couple on the next table.

He are the main courses. Also wonderful. That's Jenée's goat dish in the front, my pork dish in the back with onions. The prices in Greece are also very reasonable - we like. Kali-Nitka. (good night).

And We're Off!

Tomorrow (Saturday) at 0600 we set sail for the Greek Island of Kos. It will be a straight sail of about 2.5 days and we are stocked and ready to roll. Oh yeah, we had a great dinner again at that crazy small plate place - Ta Piatkas.

I'm happy and showing off the duck and walnut plate - mighty tasty.

Jenée is quite pleased as well - everyone is a winner today! We'll catch everyone on the other side.

 

Still Loving Cyprus

And ... we are ... definitly not off! Our original plans had us arriving our first Greek Island (Kastellorizou) by now. On sailboats plans always change, much like the weather. We have gale force winds coming today, so we'll wait here until it breaks, probably Saturday.

That leaves us plenty of time to get work done on Jungle. Or just goof off! I vote Plan B!

We are at the Grand Resort Hotel next door to our marina. They have a fantastic, reasonably priced brunch, all we need to hear. "Hey waiter can I get another 10 sausages" and "can I bring the whole roast beef to my table?" and "do you have a low salt wheel of Brie?". Americans! Gotta love 'em!

The thing about resorts is you can eat at their brunch, but the pool is for guests only. Soooooo, our undercover slueth Jenée scores a couple of resort pool towels and we plop right down poolside. The fact is the place is empty this time of year and we make it up in purchased ice cream cones, by me. Medical treatment, doctors orders, too complicated to discuss ... move along please. Off in the distance, you can see our St. Raphael Marina office building.

As Jenée is indicating, it's blowing snot out there! Technical sailing term.

You might ask, "aren't you on a sailboat, and isn't wind part of the whole sailing thingy?" To which I say, "what the hell do you know? Sitting on your fat ass, eating stale pizza, with ketchup stains from last weeks crappy barbeque all over your badly undersized T-shirt from your failed attempt at your high school JV badminton team, that went 0 and 19!".

Sorry, so sorry, I probably got just a tad defensive and unnecessarily emotional there.

Whew, better now. Any hoo, we do get some more time to check things out on Jungle, get more things done - always things to do. The fact is we can sail through this stuff if we have to, and we have. You just beat yourselves up and the boat, sails, etc. when doing it. We don't mind being stuck in Cyprus at all. The winds come up in the AM, blow hard in the afternoon and subside by late evening. Looking at the weather forecast, we'll have a good window of calm weather this weekend. That's the key to sailing finding windows of pleasant weather.

We will most likely head straight for Kos this weekend and prepare to meet up with Jenée's brother Mike and wife Monica.

 

Celebration: Cyprus Style

It's our last night with Demetris as he flies off to Dubai with his Dad, Andreas for a business symposium the next day. So, with Jungle securely docked we head out on the town once again with Demetris and lovely friend Mary Jo. Behind us are a stack of the chef's recipe/travel books.

Let's take a quick station break and take a look at Demetris company sponsored rally car. The rally takes place all over the island and unfortunately for this ETEX car, a broken axle did it in. No biggie for D, this is all part of the racing game.

Now back to dinner. Mary Jo suggested this out of the way place called Ta Piatakia (Greek for small plates). What an unbelievable place. Fortunately, Jenée takes more pictures of food than anyone I know, so we can share. Your looking at Halumi cheese wrapped in philo and honey on the left, blue cheese and pomegranate thingy in the middle and fried celery leaves in the glass jar. We'd never had any of those, loved 'em all! We also had duck liver with sweet, baked walnut shells (are you kidding me), mushrooms, bacon wrapped cheeses, some kind of chicken thing, on and on. Wow! Whacky and delicious!

Check out this salad. Jenée is the salad eating queen and she can't get enough of the salads over here. For that matter, neither can I. The chef/owner is Roddy, a Greek raised in South Africa and is now on the travel channel. Jenée bought his cook book which will do fine on our coffee table.

Mary Jo Murray is from Dublin, Ireland, has the sweetest Irish lilt and was an absolute hoot. Jenée and I had a blast.

Of course we ended up having dinner at 10 PM and closing the joint down - with cigars!

And when Mary Jo learned of my Irish heritage, it was all over! What do you do at 1:30 AM after dinner is over? Why you go out! Yikes! We're at it again!

So now we head over to catch up with Mary Jo's Irish lass pal Lorna. We met at Lorna's husbands bar/club. Lorna describes her husband, Kypros as a Ron Jeremy look alike. Yep, he looks like that Ron Jeremy - look him up. Try using the search word "schlong" - might help.

Any hoo, it was a fun, loooong night and we called it quits at the reasonable hour of 4 AM.

No matter, for Jenée and I both agree we love Cyprus and we love Demetris. What a guy! I'm just happy for him and how well he is doing. A long way from managing restaurants in Austin, TX. We will meet again my friend.

Now it's back to work on Jungle. I can't believe I woke up during daylight! Our old friend from last year, Pambos, in white hat came by to polish and shine up Jungle and he brought his friend Chris. Pambos is a former professional basketball player in Cyprus, while Chris is a former Cyprus Navy Seal. Perfect guys for shining up your boat! Funny guys too.

I'm leaning over the side and shooting back so you can check out that shine! OK, on the teak toe rail, that was my job and I might be fired soon but I'm working on it. Proper teak varnishing takes 3 - 4 days minimum and lasts 6 months max. So now I will drop this sledgehammer on my toe to test my quickness. As for the footwear, let's just say orange robes, tamboreens and airports may be in my future. While, we are on toes, any comments about a need for a pedicure? Shut up!

Jungle has never looked this good. Bravo Pambos and Chris.

And the fluff princess couldn't agree more! Next, we are off to the tiny Greek island of Kastellorizou (also called Kastellorizon). This is the eastern most Greek Isle. and is only a few miles from the Turkish coast. It is so close to Turkey that we find it in the Turkish Waters Pilot book, not the Greek one. Yassas Cyprus! Bye bye.