At first light we leave Ormos Tristomo to the northwest, that is Greatcircle and me in the active sense of the verb, because the captain is still vast asleep.
There’s no wind at all so I don’t even have to think about raising the sails on my own. For the main sail and the normal jib it’s not a big problem if you’re alone. If the reef lines are still in their normal position you can basicly concentrate on getting the sail up between the lazy jacks without getting stuck. If you take your time and maybe even abuse the bow thruster a bit this is going to be OK. Easy does it, because the electrical winch will tear everything apart if something gets stuck.
For the code 0 it’s far from ideal. You want to control the never ending furling line of the code 0 on the front deck and you want to be able to man the winch for the sheet at the same time. With very little wind you could choose to open the sail fully and reel it in later but it doesn’t feel right to let the big sail flap in the wind.
It’s about 60 Nm to our destination so we should arrive just in time to watch F1 qualification. We’re of to a great start as the whole sky colours orange as the sun peaks over the mountains of Karpathos behind us.
You might have noticed that the blog is suddenly in English. I am sorry to say there are no strategic thoughts of any kind behind that. I just took over from Marijke 3 blogs ago, as we have the time to catch up and a didn’t realise I was automatically typing in English before most of the text for this blog post was ready. Sailing around Europe we’re of course used to use other languages all the time and a lot of our daily communication with friends and followers is always in English.
We still write the blog mainly for our close inner circle and for ourselves to gather all this memories for later. Just for the same reason as we make our videos and post them on Youtube. We try to capture the beauty around us and relive many of those moments several times, not in the least whilst writing the blog or editing the videos. In the meantime there is quite a number of people following our channel and it’s funny to see lots of other people that we don’’t even know enjoy the images as well. We try to listen to the input we get, but always without losing sight of the reasons why we create the stuff we do. So you won’t see us blabla-ing into the camera all the time, we won’t start speaking English to eachother (although I notice you sometimes even think in English after some time away from Holland….) and we won’t start begging for clicks, subscriptions and/or money. On for instance Sailing-Channels.com there are lots of alternatives for people who do like channels like that. We still scan episodes of SLV as well, we look at all videos of new friends we met like Sailing Seatramp and every now and then we find other channels that are worth watching.
As long as it’s still possible (and it probably will be possible forever) to get 10 million views by catching a fish in a tiny bikini of even choosing the right clickbait for a video on how to built a wooden cabin you know that this is not a competition you want to get in to. On the other side: for those channels who want to earn money with their sailing videos it’s probably a necessity, even the very famous channels are still using it in a professional way in every episode.
Nothing to see en route from Karpathos to Astypalaia except for some bare smaller islands about mid way. On trips like this I get the PC up in the saloon and try to catch up a bit on the editing. We are trying to catch fish in the meantime but still very unsuccesful this year.
Arriving at Astypalaia we don’t even try entering the little harbour of Astypalaia itself but we choose to go into the bay on the other side of the castle high up the hill of Spatha Point. We anchor in the shallow Ormos Livadhia from which it’s going to be a short walk to the Chora.
The town is much more beautiful than we expected, as we hadn’t even heard of this island before. We wandered through the little streets around the castle for a while before we finally found the entrance. The walls of the castle are still impressive from all sides, on the inside it’s a real ruin but it’s still fun to stroll around and enjoy the wonderful views in all directions. It feels like the very irregular form of the island hides more unexpected beauty but we will have to come back another time as we will meet Seatramp the next day on Ios, again 60 miles to go.
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