Medieval Rhodes, Greece

 

Entrance to Old Town Rhodes

Greece is a very popular cruising destination and so they charge you to sail in their water.  There is  a "cruising fee" that is charged by the calendar month.  If you arrive on the last day of the month you still pay for the entire month!  Due to those cruising fees we were going to wait until September 1st to cross over.  But that was before Greece started to get nervous about their borders.  With the recent upheaval  in Afghanistan, Greece is intent on securing their borders with Turkey yet again.  Just a few weeks ago we thought we would have to sail to Cyprus in order to sail to Greece.  Greece had imposed restrictions on private vessels coming from Turkey that essentially made it impossible for the average person to comply.  But then on August 12th that all changed as Greece lifted those restrictions.  But... that ruling is being evaluated on a week to week basis and hence is always subject to change.  

Old Town Rhodes (now lots of shops)

And that is why on August 25th we set sail for Rhodes, Greece.  We checked out of Turkey (150 Euro just to leave Turkey!!) at 0920 and it was a peaceful enough day.  Once out of the harbor we put up the Genoa but within an hour it was flopping around as the wind had dropped off to almost nothing.  But by noon that had all changed.  Now the wind was up to 18 knots gusting to 20 knots and directly out of the west (the direction we were heading!).  And the waves were growing.  By 1300 we had a headwind of 23 to 25 knots gusting to 27.  Waves were breaking over the bow and giving both us and Talaria a salty shower.  By 1330 we had to slow down as we were getting hammered by the waves.  Now we were barely going 4 knots. Needless to say we were pretty happy to reach the harbor as we were just taking a beating.  By 1430 we were tied up and washing all the salt off of Talaria and us.  The only issue was some minor damage to one of our sails.

Torn batten on the staysail

It pretty much took the rest of the day to get checked in to Greece but we are really glad to be here!  Sailors know to always be flexible as sailing plans must change with the weather.  Albeit, the coronavirus has given new meaning to the word "flexible".  Anymore it seems as though plans must change by the minute😁.         

Old town Rhodes gate

We are staying at Rhodes Marina which is about a 10 minute taxi ride into town.  Old town Rhodes is the best preserved fortified, walled medieval city in all of Europe.  It is also a Unesco World Heritage Site - along with the Crusader Castle.  Very, very impressive.  We spent most of the second day here just walking around the Old Town and enjoying our first gyro from Greece!

Old town Rhodes

We had to find a sailmaker to repair our sail on short notice.  Once the sail repairs are arranged we will go to visit the Palace of the Grand Masters aka Crusaders Castle.  More pictures to come!