kateandjohnsail.boats

We just finished a wonderful week with Kate’s sister and her husband. They joined us in Athens, but for a hot minute (actually, two days) it looked like this ship was not going to sail, because *somebody* did the Athens emergency room tour and we had to treat a kidney stone. But this too did pass, and we were off to discover the Cyclades.

A lot of the fun for John and me was introducing Barbara and Steve to sailing life, and of course, sailing vocabulary—not the salty language kind, but the “why use a normal land word when there’s a specialized boaty word” kind. The kitchen is the galley, the floor is the sole, right is starboard, left is port, and there is no such thing as a rope—that sort of thing. I enjoyed lobbing new words at Steve so fast that he just started making up his own terms. A passerelle became a pasadena and a binnacle a barnacle, and pretty soon we were just pointing to things and busting out laughing.

Of course, another important part of visiting a boat is schlepping the long-awaited boat parts. Our visitors did not fail us, and those items that had been taking up precious real estate in their luggage were put to use fixing our American electrical system and our forward head (there’s another of those boaty terms…).

The Mediterranean has at times frustrated us by presenting days with no wind, or too much, or wind right on the nose, but we got in a few passages under sail that were a lot of fun. We visited small harbors, quiet bays, and town quays, but hands down our best visit was to the island of Delos, which is central to the Cyclades group and, while now uninhabited, is the site of extensive ruins of an important city from centuries past. We spent an afternoon there wandering among pillars, streets, dwellings, statuary, mosaics, and other evidence of a once-thriving metropolis (now there’s a good Greek word). We had the place nearly to ourselves; in the photo, you can see Quintessa waiting for us to return.

The week passed all too quickly, and then we had to put Barbara and Steve on a ferry from Syros to Athens, but we told them they had passed all the tests (vocabulary and otherwise), so they will be wholeheartedly welcomed to return another day.