Ok! We have discovered a way to upload some live photos, using my iPad. The photo below is Becky and Bernice sitting on the back of the boat during the hot time of the day. Bernice said I should not use the photo, but that was after the upload, so you get to see it I guess. Here are a couple of other photos taken around the boat, which is a Bavaria 43. 

Why the white sheet? Sun screen! The sun here is blazing hot between about 10am and 5pm. In fact, the locals sleep until about 9am, then everyone is up swimming for a couple hours, then everything stops cold between about 12 noon and 5pm. Then everyone slowly starts coming back out, and by 9pm things are really hopping. Restaurants and eating happens between 9pm and 1 am! If you go to eat at 6pm, the restaurant is totally empty. If you go to eat at 9pm, the first few Greek customers are coming for dinner.

Now more about the boat. Downstairs is a galley:

Ok truth be told things are decidedly "un shipshape" at the moment but you get the idea. It is messy because we have been out walking around, swimming, and enjoying this harbor today, and have not been ready for sailing. When sailing, all is stowed or it flies around the cabin.

There also are three cabins and two "heads" (toilets/shower rooms). They are small but they work:

At the bottom you see an electric control for the windlass, which raises and lowers the anchor. It's probably the thing you have heard Bernice complaining about. And last comes a photo of the head:

This particular head happens to have a separate shower enclosure. Luxury at its finest. "Waste" gets discharged into the ocean when you pump your toilet. Mmmmmmmmm. Might be best not to swim right next to the boat, at least when flushing. We have a second head which has a holding tank that can temporarily hold the waste and then you discharge at sea (which is a little nicer).

It was a late morning for Sue and I... We slept until 9am! After a great dinner last night, with an enthusiastic Taverna owner who proudly asked each of us back into the kitchen to show us each of the dishes that had been prepared for the evening, explaining to us the ingredients and if we asked, what local fisherman or farmer he had bought them from. We tried fresh sardines grilled with lemon and olive oil sauce, olives and olive oil all grown right here. "Thomas" attracted me up to his restaurant as I walked back from the Leonidhion beach after a nice swim and some good rock hunting among the pebbles. "Come up and see what I have made, he says. My friend, where are you from? How did you come here? Look what I have made! Please! I have fresh lamb stew from the countryside, served with rice or spaghetti! Fresh beef meatballs! Stuffed peppers and tomatoes, all vegetarian no meat please. Please! I have fresh eggplant from the farms right here in town. We grow much eggplant here! I have fresh beef stew! And if you please! I have fresh fish, all sorts. Look here! In the cooler! Fresh mullets, small and large! Only 6 Euro small, 12 Euro large. Not expensive!  And please! Fresh sardines! Caught today and cooked on the grill with lemon and oil! And fresh squids, look here, caught today, very tender. And I have all pastas! Tsatziki! Greek salad, fresh cheese, lettuce salads. The best around! Come try! Now, my friend, come have a free drink, on the house, what do you like? Fresh orange juice? Here, sit down and try.

After all that, how could one refuse!

We have had a few questions about what it looks like. We are using a small satellite Internet connection which does not have the bandwidth to upload the photos that our cameras take, and we do not have the computing power to alter the photos to smaller size. So for the time being, we are stuck with no photos. And you will be forced, in the Internet age of instant gratification, to actually read our words to understand. HA!

Maybe you have looked at the photo above that Bernice uploaded before we ever came here. The photo is of the entrance to Hydra town and yes, it looks exactly like that. Hydra is an ancient city with narrow, cobbled streets. Built down near the water with moutains surrounding. And most of the towns we have visited so far have born some similarity.

The harbor of Kiparissi is completely surrounded by high, high mountains. Although it stays warm and comfortable year-round, I was told that in the wintertime there is sometimes some snow up in the mountains. This time of year, everything is brown and dry, as it does not rain. But the rains come in winter and everything turns green. The locals say winter is one of their favorite times. The olives ripen then, and are picked, the streams flow, and the gardens grow.

The houses are all made of stone, and most are whitewashed on the outside (against the strong sun, this would keep the houses much cooler). The roofs are made of clay tiles. Any decorative paintwork such as doors, window shutters or frames, painted cobalt blue. I believe this is purely decorative and a national color of sorts. Maybe this originated based on available materials to make the color, but I am just speculating. Yards do not have grass. They are planted with trees providing shade. We have seen yards shaded by line trees, fig trees, bougainvillea, olive trees and others we did not know. I saw many backyard gardens, some that were growing with vegetables and were obviously being watered regularly. 

As we walk, we see in the cool of the evening that many people come and sit outside on their porches. They say good evening as we pass (in Greek of course). Some hear us speaking English and come to ask where we are from, and have we gone to see the Church of St. George. This morning on the way there (to the chapel), a woman blocks our path in the road. She is speaking in Greek which we do not understand, however I hear the words Ag Georgis, and say "Yes, we we are going there!". She grabs Sue's hand and leads her back to the path that we have missed.

Why two days in Kiparissi? With force 6-7 blowing over an open fetch of ocean for 36 hours, we could tell by just looking out of the harbor that it was not going to be pleasant out there. We certainly could have done it, but when you see the photos of Kiparissi, you will understand why a stay of 2.5 days did not bother us in the least. Add to that the fact that our anchor got friggered up on some rocks on the bottom and as we tried to pull it up we got stuck and had to spend all morning having a local diver help us get off.... Well the decision was made. An extra day in paradise!

So sue and I commenced exploring the countryside. The only available dock was 1.5 miles from town, but fortunately had a lovely Taverna right next to it with the nicest family owners. We ate there the whole time. Town was absolutely lovely, with coffee shops overlooking the ocean. A nice walk through olive groves along the coastline leading to town, overlooking a stone pebbled beach. Sounds of cicadas singing in the trees, and sheep wandering the fields with the bells around their necks ringing.

Small Greek Orthodox Chapel along the way, gate and door open, anyone welcome to go in and have a visit with God. Olive trees probably centuries old, many of them.

So we make our way up to the large church in town, and notice that the gate to the cemetery behind is open. Two town women are moving around the cemetery, lighting candles (oil lamps) on many (but not all) of the graves. We enter. Such a personal place... Most gravesides with a photograph of the person in a small sheltered area, and and the oil lamp burning next to them. Sometimes incense burners as well. And up in the farther reaches, crypts with iron gates drew our attention. A walk up to them revealed inside, as we looked through the gate, piles of the family bones. In one we counted five skulls. Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well (if only we knew which one he was!).

"Fair winds and following seas" is a mariner's blessing.  Well, on Wednesday, July 17 and Thursday, July 18, we experienced neither.  This is Bernice, and I am going to tell you my version of the last 2 days.  On Wednesday morning, while anchored in Hydra, Bernice and Mark woke up at 6:00am to the sound of a fierce wind.   A number of boats had already left the site.  We were trying to figure out how to leave the site, because in addition to the anchor, we had lines to shore wrapped around rocks.  We needed to get the lines free and bring up the anchor.  Any solution that Captain Mark came up with was not acceptable to First Mate Bernice because it included FM Bernice going into the dinghy, getting to the rocks, unknotting the lines, getting the line in the dinghy, then rowing back out to the boat.  And in the swift current, these solutions made Bernice uneasy.  I was truly missing my sailing buddies, Alan and Steve, who would have done this task without a problem.  However, we came up with an acceptable solution that included Bernice using the lines to pull herself to the rock, unknotting them, and then being pulled back to the boat from the line still attached to the boat.  This was a much better solution.  We realized (along with the boat next to us), that one of the rocks (a huge one), was moving up and down as a result of the current- and that was the line that had most of the weight of the boat - yikes!   By 8:00 I managed to release all of the line including retrieving the  line left by the boat next to us when they  left their site.  The boat was still nearby, so we were able to get close enough to throw it back to them.  Whew, what a stressful morning!  I was really looking forward to a nice sail to Monemvassia.   Unfortunately, that was not be.  By 9:45 we reached open waters where no land was in sight.  We were sailing via chart maps.  The winds were gusty and strong and the seas had swells up to  10 feet high!  Really it was 4-5 feet high but I wanted to make sure you were still paying attention.  Anyway, it might have been OK if the swells were all going in the same direction, but they weren't.  They were coming at us from all directions and it was difficult sailing, difficult staying the course, and difficult trying not to toss our breakfast overboard.  However, we  managed to reach a speed of 8.1 knots (though we averaged about 5.5 knots).  By 12:30 we determined that we were not going to make it all of the way to Monemvassia and decided to head toward Kiparissi.  We arrived in Kiparissi by 2:30 and well, skipping over the gory details, suffice it to say that we did not have lunch until 4:30.  We were tired, stressed, and hungry.  Oh, by the way, have I mentioned that this has been a fabulous vacation so far?  Maybe I should have started with that.    I will end my tale here -- and I or another shipmate will write to you at a later time explaining why were are still here in Kiparissi instead of down in Monemvassia.  

Let me just say right now that it's pretty clear Weebly was not designed with Android in mind. Just puttin' it out there.

I know that our many followers are sad that we have not been posting regularly. Sorry, but we are quite irregular, so you will just have to cope! On the morning of Sue and Mark's 30-mile hike over the mountain, paying their respects at various out-of-the-way monasteries and bushwhacking through the remains of a substantial wildfire, Bernice and Becky were having a leisurely morning on the good ship Constantina.  Coffee, scrambled eggs, ah! the good life! Then these two bedraggled specimans, who turned out to be Sue and Mark showed up on deck. Then it was 10:30 am. They took awhile to recover and clean-up but then were ready to go again. 

We visited a couple of museums, including the one with the preserved Admiral's heart (see Mark's post) and one that consisted of a small but lovely Orthodox church inside a quiet, whitewashed courtyard. Speaking of the Admiral's heart, Becky has already seen the undecaying tongue of St. Anthony of Padua this summer while visiting Italy, so she is really racking up the relic viewings. We then took a short and very scenic hike along a coastal path to the little (I mean, teeny) hamlet of Kamini where we hoped to get Mark the burgee of the Kamini Yacht Club.  We found out that, unfortunately, the yacht club was long ago dismantled.  No burgees were available. So we spent much of the afternoon sitting in a lovely taverna/scenic overlook and ordering a lot of fish dishes that we didn't know exactly what they were.  We fed the heads of small shrimp to the local cats and then started back to Hydra. 

Hydra (Hydra Town is the little town; Hydra is the island--confused yet?) is very popular and busy with big ships full of tourists unloading every hour. It's a very quaint place that doesn't really have any streets, it has alleys.  And it doesn't need streets because the only motor vehicles allowed on the whole island are a couple of garbage trucks. Brought luggage on the ship with you? It goes onto a donkey and up the alleys. Yes, all town transport is by donkeys.  It is a vertical place with all alleys leading up, up, up.  Our first evening in Hydra, we had dinner at an extremely charming restaurant part way up the hillside.  We looked out over the little town and were even above the intricately carved tower of a large church. It was a spectacular view down onto the lights of the town and harbor.

Are you wondering about the title of this post? There is much more to say about cats of Hydra. They are one of its most noticeable features. There are lots of donkeys, yes, but there are far more cats. Many of them would be beautiful if they were well cared for and healthy, but they're not. So it was a little sad to see them. 

We decided to motor down the coast a few short miles to a place with a beach and one that might not be so crowded. This decision had mixed results. The harbor of Mandraki is nice and the place is isolated, but it was also the temporary home of a group of party boats with flags saying "The Mediterranean for People 21-35." The young Aussies on board the ship we were next to were congenial and their captain was very helpful to us, but we knew we were in for a not-so-nice experience as the night went on and the crowd became more, um, well-oiled. So when they all went on taxi boats to Hydra for the evening, we moved over a few slots. No moorings here so trips to shore were via dinghy. The next morning, Wednesday, it was bye bye Hydra and hello the western shore of the Argolic Gulf. Adventure was in store.

One of the more remarkable exhibits: "Look at this silver vase, a memorial to our famous fallen admiral, who commanded the Greek naval forces and successfully defended our country. And in side this silver cup, by gift of the king, is embalmed our beloved Admiral's heart."

Sue and I got up early, maybe 6 am, had a quick breakfast and set out to climb the mountains around Hydra town. We could see up in the peaks that there were some remote monasteries which we thought we would check out. Only problem... No streets in Hydra have names. So we looked at the only map we had, and took a guess which of the narrow, winding cobbled steps would lead to the path we wanted up into the mountains. By about 7am we had made it a good way up the mountain, and all paths came to an end. The sun had just started to hit us, we had a beautiful but now getting hot, view of the town. Sweat starting to drip. Drinking water which we had brought. And now too stubborn to go all the way back down and try again. 

By this point we were directly overlooking the fortress that guards the entrance to the harbor, and the sun had risen over Hydra town. We heard the hand-pulled church bell ring as the sun touched the town, marking the sunrise. Ring, ring-ring, ring, ring-ring was the pattern, ringing for about a minute. Lets just keep going.

We end up climbing the rock and through the dried, crisped semi-prickers weeds. Finding that we could now clearly see the path we were meant to take, across the valley, with an intervening cliff blocking the way down. No place to go but down or up, and still too stubborn to do otherwise.

We finally reached the path about an hour later, after working our way around the backside of the mountain, which had burned in a wildfire. Legs blacked with scratches from the burned area. We did reach one monastery (closed) and one small chapel (gate open) where we rested in the shade of an olive tree sitting on the chapel steps and eating a boiled egg and cherries we had brought. I can see why one of monkish bent might like this. The view of two different harbors, nice breeze, cicadas singing, small garden and water collected in a cistern. Small cot in two-room house, white-painted with blue shutters and clay tiled roof. Small white chapel with blue-painted door and small bell hanging high. Simple life and simple worship. And not too many to climb that hill to disturb you.

We rested there and returned to town about 10am for a visit to the Hydra museum. See next post.