Goodbye Santorini Hello Crete

September/October 1983

It is an overnight sail from Santorini to Crete, it should be pretty straight forward, right?  Just head south and you should run into Crete.  Well we did find Crete but could not identify what we were seeing, somehow our dead reckoning was off, we should have hit Chania but where were we?  Myles and I had removed the compass to replace some wires, perhaps we upset the thing. Remember this is before GPS, we sailed west for a couple of hours but still nothing to show us where we are, turn around sail east, nothing.  Just at sunset the wind started to pick up from the west but we did find Souda Bay and turned westward up it.  The wind was now blowing about 35 knots and we inched out way into the bay in absolute blackness.  This is the main Greek naval port for the south and there are a number of LARGE unlit buoys, one went zooming by in the dark prompting us to get back in the middle of the channel.  We finally made it to a military dock and the guard was kind enough to allow us to tie up for the night but with the understanding that we must be on our way in the morning.  Needless to say we were more than a little bit grateful.
Crete is rated as the most Greek of all the islands as it was never over run by the conquering hoards.  There is a lot to see and we spent quite a bit of time sight seeing.

From Crete it was onward to Rhodos.  This was a much tamer journey and we stopped at Lindos for a couple of days, the beach was great and the kids made sandcastles.  Rhodes itself gets a lot of tourists but still manages to retain it's Greek flavour.  We spent about a week backed into the harbour wall and walked our legs off trying to see as much as we could in the short time there.

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