Greetings from Pylos, Greece. As Homer called it “Sandy Pylos.” (As I write this, I’m enjoying a morning coffee from my Bialetti. While it percolated on the stove, it told me how much it was looking forward to getting back to its Italian homeland.)

The island of Ithaca (and generally thought to be the seat of Odysseus’ kingdom) lies about 100 miles to the north-northwest. I visited there last year (if you missed it, see this post, section: The Odyssey to Odysseus’ Home). King Nestor of Pylos plays important roles in both Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Nestor is the embodiment of the elder statesman. Always giving sound and reasoned advice based on his years of experience. The other day I rented a car, and toured what is thought to be the remains of Nestor’s Palace, and also hiked to Nestor’s Cave. Thrilling.

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I am at-once scurrying about and a little sad. Scurrying about because I’m preparing to sail about 300 miles or so to Italy. I’m a little sad because I’m seeing the last of Greece.

Reggio Calabria on the toe of the boot of Italy is my intended port-of-call but we’ll see how that goes. From there, north through the Strait of Messina and west along the northern coast of Sicily. I’m a little worried about this upcoming sail to Reggio Calabria. The winds appear to be light and fickle and generally from the north and west (the direction I want to go). It’s also 300 miles “as the dolphin swims” which could mean a lot more miles from me if I need to tack upwind.

I’ve reactivated my satellite connectivity so you should be able to track my daily progress on the HJ Sailing home page when I depart later today. As with my Atlantic crossing a couple years ago, I’ll try to make daily posts of what’s happening aboard. On the HJ Sailing home page tracker, my current location is a red dot and where I’ve made posts will be a green dots. My latest post will be at the bottom of the map and scrolling to the right you’ll see older posts.

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Fair winds and following seas!

PS: Thank you for comments to yesterday’s Jumping Ship post. I appreciate them so much. In thinking about the deeper context of the intertwined stories of the post, it occurred to me just how much of the enormity of life turns on little things. Some might call it luck, or fate, or God, or the gods. Perhaps it’s a good reminder to—on one hand—not get wrapped up in the minutiae of life; but—at the same time—know that those little things, regardless of if they are in your control or not, can determine the course of the stream of your life.

To that end, yesterday would also have been Colleen’s and my 34th wedding anniversary. I spent a lot of time yesterday and the day before rewinding fondly 34 years to what was happening on those beautiful days.

Also to that end, I am thrilled to announce that our son Jack and his most-awesome wife Jessie are pregnant! They are due mid-February 2025 and, although I couldn’t talk about it publicly until now, it’s another factor that Rhett and I considered when we set our goal to sail HJ to the Caribbean. Having Hazel a couple hour flight away is such a different prospect than having her halfway around the world. It will help us balance the sailing we want to do with all that we want to be as hopeful grandparents.

Δεν θα με ξαναδείς, thought the young sailor as the stubbled captain handed him 20 dollars. The billfold was like any other seafaring officer’s wallet in the pre-credit card, pre-Euro days: US dollars intermingled with crumpled Greek drachmas, folded British pound notes, torn Turkish lira (or maybe they were Italian lira, who knows). There were also some faded notes from a failed banana republic, its uniformed strongman dictator still scowling on the face of the bill even though it was now worthless.

Years later, when fluent in English and able to think in either Greek or English, the words “You’ll never see me again,” might have been formed in the sailor’s mind. But not now—now he was just 16, and half a world away from his native Greece. The little English he did know he had picked up from Hollywood movies with Greek subtitles. It doesn’t take much to fire the dreams of an adolescent, and for this boy those movies were the spark. With very little opportunity in his native village, joining the Greek merchant marines and signing-on to a cargo ship with Port Newark, United States on its port-of-call list seemed like a good start.

Moments before and in solitude, the captain had finished his last cigarette in the pack. For him, cigarettes were like the seas of the ocean. He loved them and he hated them, and life without either was unimaginable. He remembered once being called to the bridge at 3:00 a.m. to be apprised of rapidly deteriorating weather. As the officer-of-the-watch briefed him on preparations that had made for the impending gale, the captain instinctively lit up a smoke to sharpen his groggy mind. As he inhaled deeply and listened, he wondered which would kill him first—the cigarettes or the sea.

He shook off the memory and crumpled the empty pack while the cellophane wrapper staged a crackly protest. He threw the wad disgustedly into the corner of his quarters on the dilapidated freighter and summoned the sailor. At least the last cigarette had reminded him to buy more before they embarked from Port Newark. For the grizzled captain the best thing about calling on an American port was the cigarettes. Marlboro Reds are the only way to cross an ocean, he thought. Sure, he couldn’t deny that Turkish cigarettes were strong and good, but in order to like them he would have to admit that there was something good about Turkey, which—as a Greek—was beyond his capacity.

When the sailor appeared from the darkness of the companionway and peered into the light of the captain’s quarters, the captain handed him the 20 dollar bill and issued curt orders to buy all the cigarettes he could with the money and return to the ship. This was the early-1970s, when $20 could buy a couple cartons of smokes.

Andrew Jackson, frozen in time on the face of the bill, watched it all. His countenance could be interpreted as either mild disdain or profound caring—maybe both. In this situation perhaps it was both: the mild disdain of the captain’s nicotine yellowed fingers, the empathy for the sailor whose dreams of coming to America were so close.

Along with a few personal items in his sea bag and the clothes on his back, the sailor had 60 dollars to his name. Those life savings were rolled up in his pocket and held together by a dissolving rubber band. As the sailor acknowledged his orders and turned away from the captain, he considered grabbing his sea bag from the crew’s quarters before leaving the ship but quickly dismissed the idea as it would surely arouse suspicions about his intentions. With this decision made, he added the 20 dollars to his bankroll and headed down the gangplank into the night and never looked back.

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That’s a true story that happened in the early-70s and told by a very dear Greek “friend.” (Anyone who has truly befriended a Greek knows that the word “friend” is insufficient. The English word “family” comes much closer to plumbing the depths of our connection.) Sure, I filled in a few details based on imagination but you get the gist.

I’m happy to report that today our friend—who shall remain nameless since I don’t know if international maritime law recognizes statutes of limitations—is a dual-citizen of Greece and the United States, and is proud of both citizenships.

The funny coda to this story is that, in thinking it wise to get as far from the ship as quickly as possible, our friend hopped in a taxi just outside the Port Newark shipyard. When the gruff driver asked, “Where to?” the sailor quickly replied, in a very thick Greek accent, “New York!” Mishearing, the cabbie turned around and said, “You want to go to Newark? We’re already in Newark!” (And we’re not talking about the swanky, gentrified, Ironbound Newark of today…this is 1970s Newark.) Our friend nodded insistently and 15 minutes later and 30 dollars lighter he was deposited in downtown Newark. After a cold night on the street, he managed to find a bus to Manhattan the next day.

…our Greek friend’s prime directive: Get to America.

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What Sunny loves best about her Greek uncle is how easy he is to train. She’s concluded that he could have been one of Pavlov’s subjects. While Johnny B. Goode might have been able to play a guitar like ringing a bell, Sunny rings her uncle’s bell by giving him those plaintive doe eyes…and the treats start flowing.

While Sunny and her Greek uncle have a lot in common—the love of treats, belly rubs, walks on the beach to name a few—they also share the fact that they have both jumped ship.

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However, while our friend’s ship-jumping was in the 1970s, Sunny’s was just a few weeks ago and here’s how it happened.

The day before, we had had brutally hot 30-mile “sail” from the island of Thasos to the island of Samothrace. I put “sail” in quotes because the wind just never showed up and for 20 of the 30 miles we were motoring with “Ox” (our diesel auxiliary engine [Ox-iliary if you will]) making Hazel’s saloon both loud and even hotter than it would have been otherwise. Much as the captain hated to run Ox in the open water, if he didn’t, we would have bobbed around all day and night making the heat situation for the captain and crew even worse.

We finally reached the Samothrace harbor midafternoon and for the last hour of the sail, unbeknownst to me, Rhett had been below decks looking at hotel rooms in the town with one goal: air conditioning.

Unfortunately (it turns out very unfortunately) the only room she could find that looked like it had “real” air conditioning (and not some anemic window unit) was not pet friendly. Oh well, when Rhett told me about the reservation she made I was fine to stay on the boat with Sunny. Some time apart might be helpful anyway. The heat and lack of wind was fraying our nerves and Hazel began to think she was being featured on a season of Below Deck. Let’s see…there was Below Deck—Mediterranean, Below Deck—Sailing Yacht, Below Deck—Down Under, and Below Deck—Adventure. Perhaps Hazel and crew would become: Below Deck—Shoehorn? Or: Below Deck—Creepy Loner Meets Southern Belle? Or: Below Deck—So Help Me God I Can Not Take Another Day of This.

Samothrace is a relatively inaccessible island and its history is shrouded in mystery. Unlike the Archaic and Classical Greeks that worshiped the Olympian Gods, the ancient inhabitants of Samothrace worshipped the Great Earth Mother (perhaps with today’s heat, there’s a lesson for us there). Also of note, and if you’ve ever visited the Louvre in Paris or are a sculpture fan, you’ve probably surmised that like the iconic Venus de Milo from the island of Milos, the just-as-iconic Nike of Samothraki (a.k.a., Winged Victory of Samothrace) was uncovered by the French in the 1860s and carted off to Paris to join the Venus de Milo.

All this history and mystery and inaccessibility had made it a dream of mine to visit. And, speaking of the inaccessibility of this gigantic lump of marble in the middle of the Aegean Sea, there’s no airport and there are no anchorages around the island (the sea bottom drops-off precipitously). There’s only one harbor and that harbor is small, only recently constructed, and rather commercial (not a tourist harbor). Between the large ferries that call on the island and the limited space in the harbor, private yachts are only have room to side-to moor (quite unusual for the Mediterranean in general and Greece specifically as stern-to or bow-to mooring is the norm).

So after we found a spot for Hazel and brought her safely side-to. Rhett announced her plans for the night and was off.

…Rhett’s prime directive on that sultry afternoon: Get to air conditioning.

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Sunny and I had a good night onboard in the harbor and in the cool of the next morning I was up and about preparing some things to take to Rhett’s hotel room for the day’s adventures.

Sunny seemed a bit restless so I put her up in the cockpit as I busied myself below decks. I imagine 10-15 minutes went by like this. Every so often I’d see Sunny out of the corner of my eye. She seemed happy sunning herself in the mild morning light but was staring down the concrete quay and clearly concerned by Rhett’s sudden departure the day before. While Sunny and I have a deep connection, Rhett is her person. No problem, I thought. Rhett went back to the US for a couple months last summer and Sunny and I worked out. This is just for a day or two. I called up on deck, “Don’t worry girl. We’re leaving soon to see your mommy.”

In retrospect it never occurred to me that in the couple months that Rhett was back in the US last summer, Sunny, Hazel, and I were never once side-to moored. We were always at anchor or bow or stern-to.

Anyway, at some point I didn’t see Sunny in the cockpit but it didn’t phase me as she often wanders up to the bow when she’s by herself and we have netting around most all of the boat (of course except where the side gate is down).

Soon I was ready to go and all I had to do was get Sunny’s harness on and we’d hit the road. I called her name up through the companionway and added, “Let’s go see your dog-mom!”

Nothing, na-da, not a sound. Very odd, I thought. If she was up in the bow she should have heard me and in a heartbeat I’d here the clickity-click-click of her toenails on the deck as she trotted aft. I called again…not a sound.

I climbed up into the cockpit and looked around, not panicked but with an elevated heart rate. Sunny was nowhere to be seen after. She’s got to be up in the bow, I thought. Just didn’t hear me. As I made my way forward on the port side deck I could see more and more of the foredeck and I was sure that her furry black and tan shape would come into view. In seconds I was on the foredeck and now starting to panic. I moved the sail bags on the deck to make sure she wasn’t underneath. I rushed back below decks in hopes that I brought her below earlier and just forgot about it. The whole time I’m calling her name frantically.

Finally, through my dread, I willed myself to think. Now Sunny is the most people-oriented dog I have ever known. She’s not a runner. If she’s left alone at home, she freaks out. Rhett can see her on the home cameras for hours nervously pacing and barking plaintively. When she and I are walking on a beach or a quiet sidewalk, I don’t bother with a leash because I know I can stop her with a command—even if a cat is taunting her just feet from her face. I just could not imagine that she’d leave the boat of her own accord.

She’s fallen off the boat, was the only logical conclusion I could draw. I rushed back up on deck and circled the deck cupping my hands around my eyes to reduce the glare of the now bright sun and peered over the side, fully expecting to see a black blob on the bottom. Or perhaps I’d find her floating but unconscious as her short dachshund legs are of no use with the doggie paddle. I saw nothing and stepped off Hazel and onto the quay via the side gate and looked up and down the quay wall. Nothing.

At this point I knew I needed to make the dreaded call to Rhett. In my own selfish way, I didn’t know what was worse: the fact that Rhett’s dog was missing in the first place, or that the dog went missing on my watch—when she was entrusted to me. I swallowed my dread and dialed Rhett. She answered while she was at the hotel breakfast and, to make matters worse, gave me the sweetest’ “Good morning darlin’!” I could ever hope for. I broke the news and somehow, we managed to make a search plan before Rhett became totally unglued with the gravity of the situation: Sunny was somewhere, either at the bottom of the harbor or wandering around the little town with its streets busy with cars and motorbikes, and without a collar or dog tags. We agreed that I’d keep searching the water around the boat and Rhett would make her way back to the harbor and Hazel searching all the while. As I hung up I’ve got to honestly say that the selfish side of me felt a twinge of anger. Sure, Sunny was under my care, but I’ve got a lot of other things going on aboard as well…it just goes to show that no good deed goes unpunished. Not my most noble thought. And with that, I rapidly started down a martyrdom rabbit hole as I continued the search.

Then, soon after, we had our first break in the case. The first clue. A nice 20-something Greek woman who had been fishing on the quay asked me if I was missing a small black dog. When I nearly fell to my knees at her feet saying, “Yes!” She added that she had seen the dog walk by on the quay headed to the town about 10 minutes ago. It’s not unusual that this young woman didn’t stop Sunny as there are street-dogs all over Greece, some are friendly, some not so much.

In the now-brilliant sunlight it stared at the open side gate on Hazel side-to moored to the concrete quay. It would have been a long jump for a miniature dachshund but doable. It was clearly short enough to be a tempting distance for her (whereas when bow or stern-to moored it’s much further and I doubt she would ever attempt). I shuddered at the thought of if she had missed the landing.

That’s when it hit me…

…Sunny’s prime directive that morning (that I had totally missed): Find and comfort Rhett. And, like her Greek uncle, jumping ship was the most direct course toward achieving that prime directive.

I immediately called Rhett to let her know that we could assume that Sunny was in town somewhere. When Rhett hit the “accept” button I could hear her finishing a conversation with some people from the town. Rhett was bawling, “Please, please, please. If you see this dog, call this number.” We have Hazel James boat cards, business cards with Hazel’s name, identifying characteristics, and Rhett’s and my names and contact information, and—of course—a link to this blog and our tracker. It’s very handy to give to other cruisers we meet, marina staff, etc. especially when language is challenging. We both carry a handful of cards in our wallets and Rhett had quickly given out all but one of hers to people on the street along with the plea to call her if they saw Sunny. I learned after from Rhett that along with her last card she had found a picture of Sunny on her phone and was holding the phone and card up to strangers and insisting that they take a picture of both and contact her with any Sunny sightings.

Over the phone Rhett and I devised a new plan for us both to search the town. Before I left the boat, with the help of Google translate I made two cardboard signs that read:

Χαμένο μικρό μαύρο σκυλί

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Lost small black dog

As I left Hazel and started off the town quay into the main street, I looked left-and-right and my heart sank a bit. It’s one thing to see a small seaside town in Greece through a human’s eyes, it’s another to put yourself in the paws of a 12 pound dog, eight inches off the ground. A dog who might have wondered, as she stepped off the quay and into the town, if she’d made the right decision. It was a Saturday morning and the town was busy. Cars punctuated by motor bikes rushed left and right on the main street. People sitting at the tavernas enjoying a coffee. The main street of the small town was very close to the water and for Sunny to go anywhere in town looking for her mommy she would have had to cross that street, or at least tried to cross that street. I shuddered at the thought. Or, what if a young parent or grandparent who lived out of town saw Sunny and decided that this friendly and cute stray needed a home and the kids would love her. Our trusting Sunny would go to anyone who called her and without a collar or ID she’d be scooped up whisked out of town and we’d never see her again—so close but so far.

I resumed the search trying to keep the dark thoughts out of my head. I held one of the signs in front of me and showed it to everyone who passed as I peered under tables, cars, bushes, any potential hiding place I could find. After about 10 minutes I came upon the animated and clearly distressed Rhett with several people gathered around her. I thought I’d give her the other sign then we’d separate again and keep searching. As I got closer, I could hear the kind townspeople who spoke some English comforting her. “Don’t worry, don’t worry. This is a small town. Everybody knows everybody, we will find your dog.” I thought, Yes we might but will we find her before or after she’s hit by a car?

As I gave Rhett one of the cardboard placards, a shorter gentleman with thick, dark, classic Greek hair rushed up. By her reaction, I knew Rhett had clearly talked to him before. “Madame! Madame! We have found your dog! Come with me!” That glimmer of hope was like the sun peaking around a massive thunderhead cloud brewing on the sea. Maybe, just maybe we won’t get clobbered by this storm? However, the day had already been such a roller coaster I was not going to get my hopes up until I saw Sunny in one piece with my own two eyes.

As we walked, our new best friend Dimitris told us that after Rhett had stopped him, he put the word out about the lost dog through text or social media and “Maria” from the Villa Maria guest house said her grandaughter had found a small black dog. Several times during the 5 minute walk to Villa Maria Dimitris apologized that he didn’t have his car with him to give us a ride. We assured him that that was the least of our concerns.

Finally we turned right and stepped up out of the baking sunlight and into Maria’s bougainvillea-shaded terrace. The cool shade and humidity from the plantings was a different world from the dry, dusty, sun bleached street, and there—on a bench and held by Maria (clearly the matriarch of the guest house and the family) was Sunny. Sunny without a scratch. She nearly leapt out of Maria’s arms when she saw Rhett but Maria kept her hold firm until she handed Sunny over. The reunification was complete, the tears flowed. Putting aside how Sunny did it, she achieved her prime directive, she found and comforted her dog-mom.

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Some funny codas to this story are that not only did we end up making friends with Maria and her family, we stayed that night in one of her rooms. Technically, Maria didn’t allow pets but Sunny was, of course, a special circumstance.

Also, as I settled into Maria’s comfortable accommodations and explored the terrace a bit more, I discovered her fine collection of amphorae, pithoi, and millstones. Actually, earlier we had walked right past them without noticing them when we were focused on Sunny. Amphora are smaller terra cotta containers with narrow necks and two handles used for short-term storage and transport of wine, olive oil, and other commodities; pithoi are similar but larger and for long-term storage). Interestingly the characteristic pointed bottoms of amphora are to help store them upright on ships (by wedging the bottoms between a ship’s ribs and floorboards).

While some of Maria’s were modern reproductions, others were clearly originals and thus thousands of years old. In the US, they would have been museum pieces. On Samothrace, they adorned Villa Maria’s terrace.

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Fair winds and following seas.

If you love and absolutely can’t get enough of the words that boil over in the cauldron of my brain and flow down my arms to my fingers like zip-lining tourists in Costa Rica—I have some good news for you.

If you groan whenever you see an email from me via hjsailing.blog announcing a new post, but you’re too polite to unsubscribe because you think I’ll notice—I have some bad news for you.

If you’ve been following hjsailing.blog for awhile and have discerned that I write and post a lot more when I’m singlehanding and Rhett is not onboard—I applaud your acute sense of pattern recognition.

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A month ago or so when the four of us (Rhett, Sunny, Hazel James, and I) were cruising along merrily in the Northern Sporades islands and Khalkidhiki peninsula in the Northwest Aegean Sea, I had the cute idea that my next blog post was going to be titled “24 x 7 x 31.” The gist of it would be how Rhett and I make our relationship work as we live together 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, shoehorned into a 31-foot boat.

Occasionally when Rhett feels the need to vent to her best friend Maria about our latest relationship “challenges,” Maria’s wise counsel back to Rhett is along the lines of, “Give yourselves and each other a break! The two of you are together all the time in a highly confined space in very challenging conditions.” It’s very good widening-of-the-aperture advice for Rhett and me. In what we’re doing, it’s very easy to get wrapped around the axel of what’s happening onboard and miss the bigger picture (Or, should I say, “…wrapped around the prop shaft?”).

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However, now as I sit back and look at that blog-title and associated theme, it all seems so quaint; so old fashioned. I say that because Rhett is now gone and Sunny went with her this time. They’re back in Florida and our season’s cruising plan has totally changed.

We had envisioned a “leisurely” clockwise circuit of the Aegean Sea this summer season, ending up back in the Athens area. The plan has now transformed into the beginnings of an intense westward trans-Mediterranean and transatlantic odyssey.

Somewhat similar to last summer (when Rhett had to get back to the US for several reasons, and Sunny and I sailed alone for six weeks), the combination of brutal non-air conditioned temperatures and other factors began calling Rhett back to the US. However, unlike last summer where we deemed the homeward travel as a temporary way to get around the hottest part of the summer, this year we’ve decided it best that Rhett not rejoin Hazel James in the Med for any length of time. With that decision made, it was logical that she take Sunny home too. So here I am alone with the prospect of singlehanded navigations of Colleen’s five-year death anniversary (August 21) and my 60th birthday (September 1).

Oh well, enough of feeling sorry for myself. Let’s dust ourselves off and consider the challenge and adventure shall we?…

When we started sailing this spring, our emerging plan for after the summer season was to winter HJ around Athens again and then, in the spring of 2025, our full complement of crew (I, Rhett, and Sunny) begin sailing westward out of the Mediterranean. We weren’t sure if we’d all cross the Atlantic east-to-west hoping to make landfall in the southern Caribbean in the early winter of 2025-26 or I’d do it solo. No worries though, we had plenty time and sea-miles to make that decision.

Now, given that we’ve had two consecutive seasons in the Mediterranean abbreviated by the gravity of home and that home is just so damned far away, we’ve also decided that we want to get Hazel back to North America. Unless I want to ship her across the Atlantic on a yacht freighter (which is a thing)—making the decision to get her back to North America is easier than actually doing it. But, of course therein lies the challenge and the adventure.

So, with that lugubrious preamble, I’m starting to work my way west with the goal of being in the Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco in November preparing for a 2,600 nautical mile transatlantic sail to Barbados in the Southern Caribbean. Oh by the way, it’s about 1,700 nautical miles from the Eastern Aegean (where I am now) to the Strait of Gibraltar and my exit from the Mediterranean Sea, then another 700-800 (hopefully orca-free) nautical miles from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Canaries. Doing the math of the Med exit and sail to the Canaries, that’s about 2,500 miles…just to reach the starting line.

I gotta say…as I re-read the previous paragraph, seeing it in black and white, the idea of “mailing” Hazel James back home (i.e., putting her on a yacht transport freighter with a bunch of other westbound boats) and flying home myself starts to sound pretty good. However, I’m known for ranting about other “sailors” who choose to motor 10 miles between anchorages on beautiful days with mild and favorable winds just to save a couple hours. Sure, I guess safety plays into it but I’ve also got to be true to myself. Finding an envelope big enough to fit Hazel, buying a rather expensive stamp, and dropping her into a post box somewhere in the Mediterranean would be the ultimate insult to my pride. The good news though it that it’s a good plan-B to keep in my back pocket. Also, in my time exiting the Mediterranean I’ve got lots of time to prepare Hazel and think about the long-hop from the Canaries to Caribbean.

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Certainly more to follow on the adventure and I deeply appreciate you being on it with me.

Yesterday I had a beautiful 40 nautical mile sail from the island of Lesvos to an islet off the coast of the island of Chios. This afternoon, I’ll likely depart for an overnight to Mikonos.

If you keep abreast of our tracker over the next several weeks, you should see a seemingly gentle southwestern arc being drawn from the Eastern Aegean Sea to the three fingers of the Peloponnese Peninsula. I emphasize “seemingly” because these hot summer months are the apex of meltemi season in the windy Aegean. The meltemi is a strong north wind that blows for several days on end before easing. I’ll need to pick my sailing windows carefully (thus the planned overnight sail to Mykonos tonight).

It’s funny, when I’m sailing by myself for long periods of time my thoughts often drift to friends, family, and home. It’s comforting to know that you are out there and that together we’re all on our respective voyages, journeys, and adventures. Some are evident and plainly visible to others. Some—though invisible and buried deep inside—are just as real and often more intense.

Fair winds and following seas. Hazel James out.

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PS: Some other good photos from the season so far…

In Colleen’s later years, we acquired two big Rhodesian Ridgebacks. First Machupa, and then—since “Chupie” needed a playmate—Jengo. While “playmate” sounds like such a cute and childlike term, they grew into 200+ pounds of combined dog-weight. When the two would wrestle (as brothers always wrestle) you’d best stay out of their way. However, when spent from the tussle, they’d want to nap—just as close to you as they could ever possibly get.

In getting to know other Ridgeback owners, we started hearing an apt aphorism to describe the breed’s temperament: “Whoever said, ‘You can’t buy love.’ clearly hadn’t ever paid for a Ridgeback puppy.” Although the saying was overused it was true. All Machupa and Jengo ever wanted was for the pack to be united—forever. Whenever one of us would prepare to depart the house, they’d cock their heads quizzically as if to say, But we’re all together. Why in the world would you ever want to leave?

The Ridgebacks ended up outliving Colleen by several years and I was surprised at how unaffected by her death they appeared to be. Perhaps her lingering scent around the house let them down gently. Perhaps they grieved deeply but inwardly, knowing it was best for the pack for them to put on a good dog-face to the world. Perhaps with their liberated-from-words-intuitiveness they had some kind of premonition it was all going to happen. Who knows, maybe they operate on a whole other plane of awareness and our human demarcation of death is a rounding error in the calculus of canine.

In the months after her death my kids and I often surmised that if Colleen suddenly burst through the front door in her ebullient larger-than-life manner, while the dogs would have leapt from their beds to give her a big hello, they soon would have returned to their beds and their napping, thinking nothing was strange about her entrance.

In that trying time, I read a lot and talked to a lot of professionals about my loss. The one thing I heard consistently was, “You can’t put a timeline on grief.” It sounded like good advice and I’m sure it was. However, it was so oft-repeated that as soon as the book, online article, or expert would begin the sentence—the sentence with the inevitable ending—I’d chuckle because it reminded me of the Ridgeback joke about love not being for sale. I’d then feel bad about myself for suppressing a giggle while someone was trying to offer genuine help.

My solace to my sniggering lay in the runner-up in the oft-repeated-grief-advice contest: “Everybody grieves in their own way.” With that nugget in hand I could rationalize that my internal monologue that bordered on a stand-up comedy routine was just my way of dealing.

Still, not having any sort of timeline was difficult advice to accept. In my professional career, time was everything (consulting=billing rates, billing rates=time is money). Although I’m now unshackled from traditional timelines, in sailing you’ve always got an estimated time of arrival at a waypoint in mind and an estimate of when the next foul weather will roll in. Sure either might vary wildly (in the Mediterranean Hazel’s boat speed over ground frequently drops from five knots to half a knot in a couple minutes when the wind dies and the tide turns), but at least you’ve got an estimate in mind. In retrospect and worse yet for me (and even more painful to write), I enjoyed the early-stage grief. It was a way to remember, to not forget, it made me special, it was who I was.

However, I’m here to say today that despite all the verisimilitude of well-intentioned advice, I think the counsel about there being no timeline for grief is wrong (at least for me). Last August was the four-year anniversary of Colleen’s death. Sunny and I had just entered the windy Aegean Sea from the rather docile Ionian Sea and Rhett was back home for a month dealing with some medical things. While I can’t point to one watershed moment during those weeks of challenging sailing and solitude, I experienced an overall easing of the grip of grief.. And more to the fore, I was no longer afraid that in letting it go or leaving it in the past I’d somehow lose a part of me. I’m also happy to report that as I think forward to the fifth anniversary this coming August, I’m heartened that the positive trend I started to see last August has continued.

It’s not that the grief is gone, it’s that the grief has shifted. It’s as if I was sailing upwind in those first years—an arduous affair. Upwind, the boat’s speed into the “true wind” (the wind blowing over the water) increases the “apparent wind” that the mariner experiences and also the velocity of the bashing collisions between the wind-driven waves and the boat. It’s a foul wind and a head-sea. Conversely, when the wind shifts “abaft the beam” (to behind the boat), the experience is totally different. Sure, it can still be windy (very windy in fact) but the on-deck apparent wind is eased by the boat’s speed and the waves that were formerly bashing the bows push the hull forward in foamy surges—the embodiment of “fair winds and following seas.”

If the me of today could go back four years and say something to the me of then, it would be to politely ignore those offering the no-timeline-on-grief-advice. I’d add, “Don’t worry—the wind will continue to blow. You will will still be you and you will still sail, but at some point it will shift favorably. There is a timeline for your grief. You just don’t know it yet.”

Afterword: The other night Rhett and I were sharing meal in a quiet restaurant in the shadow of Mount Olympus in Macedonian Greece. (I know, I know…a beautiful dinner in a beautiful place with a beautiful woman…pinch me! ) I related to Rhett that for a while I had been thinking about the changing nature of grief and writing a post entitled “Four Years.” However, as we talked, my heart felt vice-gripped and my vision was clouded by tears. I hadn’t felt that way in a long time, it was like a rouge wave awkwardly crashing into our bow in an otherwise following sea.

Thanks as always to my Rhett. My navigator through these uncharted waters. If there’s anything I know, it’s that I wouldn’t now be sailing these generally fair winds and following seas without her love and wisdom.

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PS: Lemonade

If you’ve been following the Hazel-tracker on our home page after our delayed launch this season, you may have noticed that we only sailed three days before taking a week’s break in the town of Chalkis on the Island of Evia. Both before and after Hazel’s launch, Poseidon gave us a few lemons, but we made some great lemonade.

First, before launch the work on Hazel took a bit longer than expected. With that extra time granted we were able to experience Orthodox Easter with our adopted Greek family in Athens, and also make a two-day trip to Meteora.

Then, midnight Easter Sunday (i.e., Saturday going into Sunday), the faithful gather in the church with the crowd spilling onto the church’s steps and courtyard. The sacred flame from the altar is spread candle-to-candle in hushed adoration by the congregation—family member to family member, stranger to stranger, it’s all the same. “Sacred flame” is no pretty figure of speech here, the altar’s light is a scion of the Holy Fire which was originally lit day before in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem (the site of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection). After lighting in Jerusalem the flame is flown to Athens then distributed to Orthodox churches across Greece.

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After our Orthodox Easter, we took an overnight coach tour (bus tour) to Meteora, the land of mountain-top monasteries…

If you’re a James Bond fan, enjoyed my connection to From Russia with Love in our Türkiye Trot blog post, and the Meteora monasteries look vaguely familiar…you’re probably thinking of the final scenes of For Your Eyes Only:

After our Orthodox Easter and trip to Meteora and around the time we splashed Hazel (as documented here), we noticed Sunny favoring and continually licking and gnawing on a forepaw. By the time we made our first port-of-call in Chalkis (three day-sails later), she was limping and in pain. Rhett took her to a vet and she was diagnosed with a deeply broken toenail (i.e., broken before the nail emerges from the skin). While it wasn’t serious if properly treated, if it had got infected it could start a whole series of bad things including a bone infection. The vet recommended letting it grow out for a week and then he could trim it and it would then resolve itself. Presented with that news, we mixed up another batch of “Poseidon’s lemonade” and left Hazel in the protected town dock of Chalkis and took a road trip past Mount Olympus and to Greece’s second largest city of Thessaloniki.

Yeah, yeah…I know you’re thinking what I’m thinking. If you had to guess that a member of the crew was going to redirect our entire adventure due to a broken nail—you wouldn’t have picked Sunny.

Although today’s Thessaloniki is just one-third the population of Athens (about 40% of Greece’s entire population lives in Athens), historically Thessaloniki was never not an important city. Yes, Athens was a major polis during the Classical Greece, Hellenistic, and Roman periods (roughly 450 BC to 450 AD) but after Rome fell, Athens declined. During the ensuing 1,000 years of the Byzantine Empire and then 400 years of Ottoman domination of Greece, Athens was just a humble village of a few thousand people (which is one reason why its acropolis and ancient ruins are so wonderfully preserved). It wasn’t until Athens was “rediscovered” and named the new capital of Greece in 1834, that its modern form began to take shape. Meanwhile, during the Byzantine period (AD 323-1453), Thessaloniki was the second most important and second richest city in the entire Byzantine Empire (after Constantinople, today’s Istanbul). Like Constantinople, Thessaloniki fell to the Ottomans in the 1400s (Thessaloniki in 1430 and Constantinople in 1453). As we toured the city, Thessaloniki’s city walls were reminiscent of Istanbul’s (Istanbul city walls highlighted in our Turkey Trot post).

Thinking about the connections between Türkiye and Greece it’s interesting to consider that the father of modern Türkiye, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was born in 1881 in Thessaloniki. However, at that time Thessaloniki was part of the Ottoman Empire and would remain so until 1912 (much of the rest of Greece had won its independence from the Ottomans in 1821). (For background, I introduced Atatürk and his popularity in Türkiye in our Turkey Trot post.)

Given all this, while we were in Thessaloniki I decided to tour the modest house where Atatürk was born (Rhett and Sunny opted for an afternoon by the pool). The Turkish Consulate in Thessaloniki is also located on the grounds of the house and the Turkish government runs the house as a free museum. As I walked through the restored rooms with their various exhibits of his life and death, I was reminded of this passage from our Rick Steves’ Istanbul Guidebook…

Atatürk died at 9:05 on November 10, 1938—and every year, all of Türkiye still observes a minute of silence at 9:05 on that day to honor the man they regard as the greatest Turk. For a generation, many young Turkish women worried that they’d never able to really love a man because of their love for the father of their country. Because of Atatürk, millions of Turks today have a flag—and a reason to wave it.

While a memorable paragraph, I had always thought it “just a tad” hyperbolic on a couple counts. Then, back when we were in Istanbul, an İstanbullu told me that the annual minute of silence is a literal minute of silence—people stop whatever they are doing, cars come to a complete stop in the middle of roads and intersections, trains come to a halt on their tracks.

OK, so maybe I was off on the figurative vs. literal thing—but, Women not being able to love another man because of Atatürk? C’mon, that’s too much. Then, that afternoon in Ataturk’s birth house in Thessaloniki, Greece, I meandered into a sparsely furnished room with white walls and a glossy pine floor. Opposite the door, in the outside corner of the room framed by tall windows sat a reproduction of the man himself—looking rather imperious, dressed in a dapper black tuxedo and semi white-gloved. I say “semi” as he was curiously only wearing one glove. His right hand was exposed and in his gloved left hand he held his right glove. Who knows? Perhaps after-hours in the empty museum he comes to life and does his best Michael Jackson moonwalk across the pine floor. Maybe, just maybe, this morning (before opening time) he was so lost in the ecstasy of the dance he forgot to re-glove before assuming his diurnal position?

Anyway, there was also an aluminum and glass half-wall around him to keep any visitors from getting too close. I chuckled as I scanned the empty room thinking about how much overkill the barricade seemed to be. As Türkiye is predominantly Muslim and Muslims are no fans of icons or iconography, I thought the whole thing a bit cheesy. Sure, I have deep respect for the man—but less so for the mannequin. I was in a museum, not Madame Tussauds.

Then, the tide turned and in rolled a tangle of Turkish tourists. They had an entirely different reaction to the Atatürk model. The excitement in the room became palpable and soon the cameras were out and the posing began. I couldn’t help notice that those in the frame with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk tended to be the women around my age.

…the defense rested its case, my two-counts of hyperbole lay dashed in the earth.

In closing, if the Father of the Turks’ birthplace being in modern-day Greece has got you thinking about the fluidity of borders, consider the converse: The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, that is the head of the Greek Orthodox Church with its roughly 300 million worldwide followers is located in today’s Istanbul, Türkiye. (The Patriarchate is to the Greek Orthodox faithful what the Vatican is to Roman Catholics.)

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Fair winds and following seas! We’re currently making our way out of the channels that separate Evia and the mainland (our updated track is here) with our next goal of cruising the Northern Sporades islands.

Last evening at anchor we were treated to a close sighting of a very rare Mediterranean Monk Seal in the midst of a fish dinner. (Sadly, there are less than 1,000 in existence today.)

Although Hazel and I have been an item since 2017 and Rhett and Sunny signed-on in 2020 with their first voyages aboard, recommissioning and re-provisioning her after a winter layup takes confidence. Which at times is hard to muster when suffering from something like imposter syndrome.

The confidence comes from the fact that we’ve done this before, we’ve sailed with all this gear and these spares and it has fit…somewhere. We’ve re-provisioned her after a winter with table salt being the only food item left onboard.

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In the boatyard, Hazel’s keel rests on wooden blocks on the dusty gravel and her hull is supported by metal jacks. Clambering aboard entails climbing up a 10-foot ladder. While I’ve compared Hazel to a “tiny house” in the past, perhaps this is the “tiny treehouse” version of her. Standing on deck when she’s “on the hard” in the boatyard puts our eye-level about 20 feet off the ground and affords a nice view of the Mediterranean. Nice when the weather is fair and the wind not whipping. However, this is the Aegean Sea and the Aegean blows hard.

On deck, on the hard, on a breezy day (of which there are many) I pause my work and look out over the channel between the Greek mainland (where Hazel is) and the island of Makronisos my throat goes dry and bowels clench. The wind funnels and accelerates between the relatively narrow constriction of the mainland and island, and drives whitecaps and a nasty chop. I sailed in that last year? And enjoyed it? Best not to look too long and just try to be confident, Yes I did. Yes we did, and we had a great time doing it.

The reason I say “something like imposter syndrome,” is that the unmodified term “imposter syndrome” implies that it’s not real, just a aberration of self-perception. I suppose you could chuckle and brush it off by saying, “Oh I’m sure that sailing for you two is just like riding a bike, once you learn you never forget.” But that’s easy for you to say, you’re not the imposter.

Rhett feels the same…I know. Although she doesn’t have the pressures of being the captain, she doesn’t have the lifetime of sailing experience. I just keep telling myself, We’ll work it out. Be confident. It will all come together.

This is our first time wintering Hazel on the hard. There are some benefits to her spending the winter out of the water—for starters, she can’t sink while unattended. However, there are some downsides for the crew returning to her. Sure, there’s the physical aspect of up and down a ladder many times per day and often with supplies, gear, or provisions (or Sunny). But, and more importantly, there’s the emotion and feel of Hazel. On the hard, she feels like a house (albeit that tiny house) there’s no movement, no give, no animation. On the hard, the step down from the coach to the deck feels like the bottom step and floor in a house.

That same step while she’s on the water feels like tapping the back of a finely built ukulele or guitar—it rings. Your foot contacts the deck and she gives just a little bit and the reverberations flow down her timbers to the water and then back up your leg—you are one with something you love.

My previous post was entitled Splash Eve and posted on Sunday, May 19. It turns out, I lied (not the first time, won’t be the last). Bright and early, Monday morning we checked out of our rented room in town and hustled down to Hazel in the boatyard only to get a call from Michalis, our guy doing and organizing the winter work on Hazel, that the yard wasn’t going to be launching boats on Monday due to “port control.” (Probably because of a number of big ships entering and exiting the harbor and not having room on the sea wall for the crane to drop small yachts into the water.) Oh well, nothing to be done—port control is port control. That night, we ended up sleeping on Hazel in the boatyard which was a first for us. The lack of movement, lack of life in her was unsettling. Don’t get me wrong we love a calm anchorage and a calm berth, but the calmest calm is worlds different than the hard.

Finally, on Tuesday midday the crane and crawler showed up and the crane crew gently fitted forward and aft lifting slings on Hazel, lifted her off the blocks and jacks. After a bit of jostling and tugging of lines from Hazel to the ground crew, they expertly threaded the needle set her onto the specially modified “crawler.” Then, it was a creeping quarter-mile from the yard to the launch-point on the seawall. As we followed behind Hazel in Michalis’ foreman Nicos’ car, I was reminded of the Apollo rockets making their slow journey from Kennedy Space Center’s Vehicle Assembly Building to the launchpad.

At the seawall we were met by another crane who gingerly lifted her off the crawler and swung her out over the water. As she was lowered, Rhett, Sunny, and I—and an engineer who had done much of the winter mechanical work—boarded her when she was at seawall level. We held our breath as her keel disappeared into the Mediterranean Sea. We realized with relief that at least Hazel hadn’t forgotten how to float. She had upheld her end of the bargain, now we had to remember the sailing part. The engineer and I fired up Ox and checked for leaks. (If a fitting hasn’t been tightened properly it can leak like a sieve—and you want to find that out while the boat is still in the slings and can be lifted out of the water if need be.)

After all checked-out, the engineer departed and we motored across the harbor to a dockside berth for several nights of final work and provisioning and waiting for some good weather.

I write this on Thursday night with our departure early tomorrow morning for the first sail of the year! (Tomorrow is Friday and we’ve got to be gone by midday as this is a very busy charter harbor and most charter boats turnover on the weekends and every berth in the harbor is occupied by returning charter boats.)

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Thanks for reading and do stay tuned. It looks like our new tracking device is working perfectly and will be showing our near-real-time location as we sail (map posted on our home page, if you zoom way in you can actually see our progress from the boatyard across the harbor when we launched). If all goes according to plan, you’ll be seeing us work our way northward between mainland Greece and the Island of Evia (Nisos Evvvoia or Νήσος Eúboia for you graecophiles).

Fair winds and following seas!

Note: Please excuse any odd timing here as I started this post several weeks ago.

I sit in front of a yawningly black and empty computer screen at our two bedroom rented flat in the New District of Istanbul, Türkiye. As our month in the country winds to a close, I’m lost in thought about how I can summarize everything that the city evokes. As with any part of the globe, there are innumerable fine travel guides available that cover the major sights; there’s no use adding fuel to those fires. The question is, what does the city and our time here mean to us and how did it change us?

Although we’ve had some great weather during our month, it’s drizzling on this late-April morning and our third-floor walk-up apartment has taken on a distinct chill. Even if the sun were to break through the clouds, the old stone and brick building would stay chilly for days.

When Rhett, Sunny, and rented a one-bedroom apartment in Paris for a month in the fall of 2022, it was just the three of us and we didn’t venture outside the city. While that was great, we organized our month in Istanbul a bit differently. First, it was marginally more expensive to rent a two bedroom apartment. So we jumped for the second bedroom and invited Jack and Jess, our son and daughter-in-law, for the second week of the month and Sarah and Mike, some of our best friends, for the third week. Also, when Jack and Jess came, the four of us took a several day side trip to Cappadocia in central Türkiye. The second and third week timing of family and friends was excellent in that it gave Rhett and me a chance to settle in and get to know the city a bit prior to entertaining, and the last week alone gave us a chance to clean up a bit and see some off-the-beaten-track sights of the city.

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Prior to my month here, I never knew what to make of Istanbul. (Or is it Byzantium? Or Constantinople?). Is it European? Is it Asian? Is it predominantly Christian or Muslim? Just where did Türkiye come from anyway? And how do the Byzantine Empire and Ottoman Empire relate to Türkiye?

I’ll do my best to untangle a little bit of that here as well as describe how the city and its people changed Rhett and me during our month’s stay.

For starters, here’s brief but solid excerpt of Istanbul’s past 2,700 years:

For more than two millennia, Istanbul/Constantanople has been one of the world’s greatest cities:

1) The Greek city founded for its strategic location atop a hill surrounded on three sides by water (700 BC – AD 300)

2) The grand eastern capital of the Roman Empire (AD, 333 – 476)

3) Its thousand years as the greatest city in Byzantine Christendom (476 – 1453)

4) Its four hundred years as a Muslim capital of the vast Ottoman Empire (1453 – 1920)

5) The modern metropolis of today, encompassing Muslim, Christian, and secular residents (1920 – today)

Excerpted from Rick Steves’ Istanbul Guidebook

From a nomenclature perspective the city began as Byzantium (as it was founded around 700 BC by the Greek king Byzas). Around 333 AD the Roman Emperor Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire to the city and officially renamed it Nova Roma (“New Rome”) but everyone just called it Constantinople (“The City of Constantine”). That name more-or-less stuck for 1,600 years until finally being renamed Istanbul in the 1930s with the founding of the modern Turkish republic after World War I. (I say “more-or-less” as relates to “Constantinople,” as the Ottomans “Arabic-ified” it to a rough transliteration of Konstantiniyye or Qustantiniyyah.)

By the way, our adjective “Byzantine,” meaning something that is overly complex and unwieldy—especially a bureaucracy or government—derives from this history.

If, from reading all above, you’re now wondering (as I did), Why all the fuss and focus about this place? its worth going back for a quick read of our previous post—Autumn 2023: Planes, Ferries, and Automobiles—where we addressed thalassocracies (maritime empires), and specifically Venice’s thalassocracy. While the term “crossroads” is a bit overused in our parlance, it’s quite fitting for Istanbul. It truly sits at choke-point between East and West and between Europe and Asia.

At a macro level, while being at a crossroads of the trade of goods and ideas is important, it’s only half the equation of Istanbul. A sport’s analogy is helpful to understand the other side of the coin: “The best offense is a good defense.” Having everything means nothing if you can’t keep what you have and protect who you love. So, zooming in to the defensive micro level, Istanbul’s location is also ideal.

Given that Istanbul’s Old Town is surrounded on three sides by water (the Sea of Marmara to the south, Bosporus Strait to the east, and Golden Horn to the north), the west is the only unimpeded land route into the original city (more on that coming).

Also from the previous maps, note that while Istanbul’s Old Town is in Europe, a couple miles across the Bosporus lies Asia. Many Istanbulllus work in European Istanbul but live in Asian Istanbul, relying on ferries or the under-Bosporus metro tunnels for their daily intercontinental commute.

To close this chapter of the post, one charm of the city that everyone notices, especially sailors, it its seafaring feel. While great cities we’ve visited like London or Paris have much to be said for them and are situated on major rivers, they lack the maritime ambiance of a gateway to the world.

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It’s now a week later, early morning on our second-to-last full day in Istanbul and I know I’ve got to get something out the door and posted. I know this because as soon as we return to Athens in a few days, Rhett, Sunny, and I will be launched into Greek Orthodox Easter celebrations and then a quick land trip so some Greek monasteries and then (hopefully) to launching Hazel James and starting our 2024 sailing season. While it’s not now-or-never for a proper blog post about Istanbul and Türkiye, it’s probably now-or-November and by then the distinct edges of the impressions, feelings, and memories will be dissolved and eroded like a Classical Greek column in a modern metropolis.

On this morning, I’m woken around 4:30 a.m. by the call to prayer emanating from our local mosque down the street. I know that if I’m not sleeping, I should rouse myself and start writing but I can’t bring myself to it. The bed is too warm and comfortable and Rhett is next to me and Sunny is sleeping on a pillow above Rhett’s head. It’s a compromise we’ve worked out with Sunny. If Sunny totally had her way she’d be snuggled between us. I lightly scratch Rhett’s back which causes her to sigh and stir. Occasionally, I pause and do the same on the underside of Sunny’s ears (provoking an eerily similar response). I drift in and out of consciousness, half dreaming (I think of brewing Turkish coffee), half thinking about writing. I bask in the warmth of our bed. On one hand it’s effective as I’m in a partial dream-state and my ideas all seem larger than life; on the other I know my mind is playing tricks on me. My mind knows that the better my thoughts appear, the longer I’ll stay in bed.

As the muezzin’s call to prayer continues, I’m reminded of our first couple weeks in the city which was during the last weeks of the month of Ramadan. During Ramadan and in addition to the before-sunrise call to prayer, a lone drummer would trot down our street (and every street in our neighborhood) banging away to a frenetic rhythm. The cobbled streets and brick-and-stone facades of the apartment buildings effectively placed him at the bottom of a giant sound bowl and each boom of the base and splash of the snare was amplified as it reverberated up to our windows. Although not a percussion expert, I was in high school marching band and have a deep appreciation for the drum corps. The first time I was awoken by this cacophony I assumed it was three or four drummers at work. Not until several days later (after I had gotten to bed early the night before) and I “sprung from my bed to see what was the matter” like Clement C. Moore’s guy in the cap, I threw open the window sash and was shocked to find that the magnificent clatter was made by one clearly talented and clearly caffeinated percussionist. And it wasn’t until a few days ago when I attended a military band concert did I discover the drummer’s polyphonic secret. The drummer’s in the military marching band all had large drums strapped to their chest canted from left to right (as the drummer looks at his drum). The right side of the drum was the bass side and the drummer held a mallet and boomed out the rhythm. On the left side, the drummer had a much smaller and quicker drumstick. With his left hand he clamped this riding-crop-like stick to the upper rim of the left and treble side of the drum. I imagine that side also had snares across the drumhead to accentuate the crackling high frequency. While the bass boomed a cadence, the squad of four military percussionists (or one lone Ramadan drummer) rattled out the off-beats with the snare side of the drum.

Why all this pre-dawn clatter you ask? It’s a legacy from pre-ubiquitous-alarm-clock days reminding observant Muslims to wake and eat and drink their fill before sunrise and the start of the day’s Ramadan fast (that lasts until sunset during the month of Ramadan).

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Not only is Istanbul old, at a population of 15 million in the city proper, it’s also big. (As comparison New York City is 8.5 million in the city, 20 million including surrounding regions; Chicago is 3 million, 9 million total in the area; and Los Angeles is 4 million, 18 million total in the area.) All this is to say that there are a lot of people trying to get from one place to another—exacerbated by water, steep terrain, and ancient, narrow, cobbled streets.

While the city has some excellent public transport—busses, ferries, metros (subways), trams (streetcars or trolleys), and funiculars (an underground version of Pittsburgh’s “inclines”)—and we’ve used all of them in our month here, traffic in the city is nuts. It’s nothing like US-city traffic with wide segregated wheeled traffic streets and pedestrian sidewalks, but more a shaken cocktail with cars parked on sidewalks, motor scooters and motorbikes driving the opposite direction on one-way streets and on sidewalks whenever convenient, all while being ignored by pedestrians.

Istanbul city planners trying to stem the amount of wheeled traffic on sidewalks have installed iron posts and rounded concrete “tombstones” on curbs that would damage a car trying to drive or park on a sidewalk (of course the motor scooters and motor bikes just weave between them). It’s a nice touch but they’re a tripping hazard for pedestrians. Also, planners have installed one-way treadles to enforce one-way streets for cars (of course the two wheeled traffic just drives around them as well).

Within days of being in the city, Rhett and I had coined the term “Turkey trot” between us. The Turkey trot was that little stumble (hopefully just a little stumble) when one of us got careless and wasn’t looking down and caught a toe or heel on a tombstone or various other uneven steps and curbs.

When our two sets of guests arrived, we gave them the same “safety briefing.” While your eyes will naturally want to wander and take in sights, while you’re walking keep them down, anticipating the inevitable surprises that the next step will bring. When you want to admire the city, stop and do it from a fixed position. Always walk in a generally straight direction and at a constant speed. You can be on what you think is the most pedestrian-only thoroughfare in the city, only to have a motor scooter whiz past you from behind. Istanbul drivers will dodge the predicable pedestrian so the name of the game when walking and crossing streets is to be predictable.

It’s funny though, reflecting back as I write this post after a month of getting around the city, I didn’t see one traffic accident. Somehow it all works.

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One trend that Rhett and I noticed is that, in general, homeless cats in Istanbul seem to receive better treatment than homeless citizens receive in the US. Single-minded Sunny didn’t concern herself too much with socioeconomics or fairness and just enjoyed the stalking…until the tables were turned.

It reminded me of a similar situation with a Parisian crow in the fall of 2022.

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I spent a day walking the old city walls and another touring the Askeri Müze (Military Museum) and what I found most interesting is that the Christian city falling to the Muslims in 1453 marked not only the end of the Byzantine Empire (a.k.a., the Eastern Roman Empire), but also a fundamental change in siege warfare. Prior to the invading Ottoman’s victory, the name of the game for cities (and castles for that matter) was big walls, preferably with moats or natural water to make it more difficult for invaders to scale the walls. If the walls were big enough, and the few gates strong and well-defended a city with enough provisions could just wait out an invader’s attack.

Constantinople’s defensive walls were some of the finest in the world. Of the 13 miles of the city’s walled perimeter, about three miles stretched north-to-south across the land, from the Golden Horn to the north to the Sea of Marmara to the south. The remaining 10 miles of sea walls were smaller and not as heavily guarded as the water provided an additional defense. Although attacked many times, the walls were only breached once before 1453 and that was in 1204 (250 years prior) by the Fourth Crusade. If you’re wondering why the greatest Christian city in the world would be invaded and sacked by Christian Crusaders, and then the “Crusaders” stick around for 50 years of occupation, it’s a good question but beyond the scope of this post.

To take Constantinople, the Ottomans had built massive state-of-the-art cannons. The largest had a barrel diameter of 30 inches and could hurl a 1,200 pound granite ball a mile. After days of constant bombardment they were able to breach the walls and Ottoman troops flooded into the city.

One other thing if you look carefully in the above picture, you’ll see the cannons shoulder-to-shoulder with catapults. A juxtaposition reminiscent of a World War I battlefield with mounted cavalry and tanks on the same battlefield.

One closing note on the subject of siege warfare is that to outlast a siege, a city needs a lot of water. To that end, we toured the now-almost-empty Basilica Cistern the largest of several hundred underground water-storage cisterns that supplied the city’s then-population of 50,000-70,000 people. If 20 million gallons of capacity is hard to comprehend, how about 30 Olympic swimming pools? Or, over 300 columns? Or 150 yards long and 70 yards wide? Or—going to the darker side—the over 7,000 slaves who labored on building it?

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When I lived in Bangalore India in the mid-2000s, I noticed that in Bangalore, and in virtually every other city, town and village I visited, there was an “MG Road.” When I asked an Indian friend who had travelled in the US what it meant and why so common, he responded at two levels, “First, ‘MG’ is the initials of Mahatma Ghandi, the father of our nation. Second, our ‘MG Road’ is akin to your ‘Kennedy Avenue’ or ‘MLK Boulevard’ or ‘Washington Street,’ you’ve probably got one of those in every town in the US.” I had to admit that he had a point, and there’s nothing like a comparison to set something in your mind.

One other quick side-note on the subject of Ghandi that relates to our story is that “Mahatma Ghandi” was not born “Mahatma Ghandi.” While “Ghandi” was his family (and given to him at birth), “Mahatma” was bestowed upon him later in life by the Indian public as a title of respect. (Mahatma is Sanskrit for “great soul” or “noble soul.”)

The Atatürk Boulevard in our story refers to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who—like Mahatma Ghandi—was not born Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and is seen as the father of the modern Turkish state. Also—like the ubiquitous Matama Ghandi Road in India (or Kennedy, MLK, Washington in the US)—there are literally thousands of Atatürk Boulevards and Streets in Türkiye. However, I’ve got to say that after living in India for a year and being a native of the US and now having lived a month in Türkiye, Atatürk’s modern-day presence in his native land far out-shadows Ghandi’s or Kennedy’s or Martin Luther King’s or even Washington’s. That’s not a judgement call at all, just an observation of real-life presence of a historical figure in a society.

He was born in 1881 in Thessaloniki and given the name “Mustafa”…just Mustafa. Thessaloniki is on the northwest coast of the Aegean Sea and at the time was a part of the Ottoman Empire (today Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece with the capital Athens as largest). It’s worth noting that not only is Thessaloniki an intended port-of-call for Hazel James this during this summer’s cruise, it’s also the eponym for the Christian Bible books First and Second Thessalonians (a “Thessalonian” being someone who lives in Thessaloniki, just like a Corinthian is someone who lives in Corinth).

Mustafa was given the additional name Kemal by a military academy teacher (Arabic for excellence or perfection). During World War I the expansive Ottoman Empire (which was declining in power and influence in the world) joined the Central Powers which also included Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria. Although an often outspoken critic of his superiors, Mustafa Kemal served in many key military leadership positions after the war. With the Allied Powers victorious in WWI and the Treaty of Versailles taking center stage (which outlined the terms of Germany’s surrender and reparations), the Ottoman Empire fell and its expansive territories carved into smaller countries (e.g., Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, etc.) leaving roughly the modern-day Türkiye as the “rump state.” Greece seized the opportunity and invaded the Turkish territory in hopes of reclaiming its historic lands (including Constantinople/Istanbul). The three-year bloody and atrocity-filled “Greco-Turkish War” or “Turkish War of Independence” ensued (the name depending on what side you were on, and atrocities committed by both). In this war when there was basically no functioning Turkish government Mustafa Kemal came into his own and led the ultimately victorious resistance. Like the US’s General George Washington being elected as the first president, Türkiye’s first National Assembly elected Mustafa Kemal as the country’s first president in 1923 and dubbed him Atatürk (father of the Turks) and he effectively led the country until his death in 1938 (at the age of 57).

In studying his life and works, he appears to me as an emblematic “benevolent dictator.” Sure, after-the-face you could question some of his actions or methods but at the time, Türkiye was in such a bad situation a deliberate and drawn out democratic process could have sent the country into a civil war and yet more strife. He brought a clear and compelling vision to the war-weary Turkish people which included:

• Aligning Türkiye with the West
• Separating religion and state
• Adopting the Western calendar
• Decreeing that Turks should have surnames (as is in Western custom)
• Changing the Turkish alphabet from Arabic to modified Roman letters
• Outlawed the fez and the veil
• Abolished polygamy
• Instituted women’s suffrage

The net-net of these “recent” accomplishments (“recent” in relation to the long-view of history in this part of the world) and the success of the modern Turkish state, is that “Atatürk” (as he’s generally referred to) is an obsession in the country. In Greece in most small mom-and-pop shops or tavernas (restaurants) somewhere up high and behind the cash register, you’ll see a small Orthodox Christian shrine complete with Byzantine-style icon of the Madonna and child, whereas in Türkiye most likely you’ll see a shrine but it will be to Atatürk. Town squares are adorned with Atatürk’s stern visage, alternating with Turkish flags. His signature is well-known as it’s a popular tattoo with the younger set.

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The final thing that must be said about Türkiye is…the people. While we’ve found every country we’ve visited just full of good people, the Turks are over-the-top. To a person we found them open, friendly, always willing to help, and honest (sure, no price is ever fixed and they expect you to bargain). Although we were out at most all times and in all places, and walking and riding public transit, we never felt uncomfortable or threatened in any way.

I’ll finish with a vignette that illustrates the people: We cleared out of our apartment on May 1, what we didn’t realize was that the first of May is International Workers’ Day in Türkiye. While it’s roughly akin to our Labor Day, the Turks take this day seriously. So seriously that all public transit is shut down and, to minimize public demonstrations, the police prohibit any traffic (including taxis) from entering the downtown areas of Istanbul (long story there). What was pertinent to our story is that it was nine in the morning, we had all our luggage and Sunny and expected to easily catch a cab for the 45-minute trip to the airport. Instead, we were met with streets that were so empty, if they’d been in a cowboy western movie, there would have been tumbleweeds rolling down them. We were were starting to despair about getting to the airport and wondering if we could delay our flight to Athens and stay in our apartment another night, when a policeman flags down a private car, says a few words to the two guys in the car, then turns to us and says, “These are my friends, they will take you to the airport for 1,000 lyra (the same price as a taxi).” The next thing we know, we’re speeding though deserted city streets doing our best to communicate with two new friends.

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Fair winds and following seas!

“Oh great…so now the rest of my life is going to be nothing but watching Ted Lasso reruns in Florida.”

That was my choice snide and snippy comment to Rhett as the 2023 summer sailing season was winding down. At least the choicest one I can remember; I’m sure there were others.

While I can’t recall the precipitating events, the oath was most certainly uttered when it felt like life had ganged up on me: the wind wasn’t cooperating, Hazel wasn’t cooperating, the crew wasn’t cooperating and—most importantly—my head wasn’t cooperating.

Of all of Rhett’s positive traits, her ability to not overreact to the occasional Ahabian antics of her captain is somewhere in the top-five. She’s the oil on my oft-troubled sea.

In these situations, my mind—under self-inflicted threat—enters a zero-sum survival mode. It’s all or nothing. If I can’t sail all the time, I might as well not sail at all. It’s a dark place.

On that specific day the logical conclusion I drew is that if I’m not sailing 24x7x365 I’ll just run out the clock couch-bound with a blank stare, a remote, and the hilarity surrounding a pupal American-football coach surrounded by the chrysalis of a proper English football club.

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That was my brooding six months ago as I sat like Rodin’s The Thinker, staring at the chessboard of my life. By my own free will, move by move, I had put myself in check. We were leaving Hazel and coming home.

On one hand today (in the spring of 2024) it’s the same. On the other, it’s diametrically opposite. Yes I’m still staring down at the board contemplating both the universe and my next move within it, but I’m now sitting on the other side of the table.

Last fall, when I saw I had no other moves possible that would lead to a different outcome, I toppled my king, accepted “defeat” somewhat gracefully and came home. Now that we’ve got less than 48-hours until the wheels are in the well of our flight back to Athens and Hazel (and everything that I thought I wanted)—I realize that, for the most part, I throughly enjoyed my winter shore leave: a bed that doesn’t move, no risk of the anchor alarm sounding at 2:00 a.m. notifying us that “the hook” is dragging, hot water without end, clean clothes…and—lo and behold—occasionally I sat still on the couch. As the closing credits of a Ted Lasso episode that I had seen before rolled across the screen, I had an odd feeling that I actually enjoyed the experience. The coach, sidekicks, and team felt like old friends. Over the winter I even had short-lived glimpses of a mental detente, an epiphany if you will: With an open frame of mind, all of life can be painted a voyage. The question becomes if it physical voyaging across the land and sea, or virtual voyaging in the mind, or some self-augmenting combination.

Of course, as the days count down to our throwing off the bow lines and sailing away from safe harbor, my imposter syndrome kicks-in and I’m a bit nervous getting back on the water. Will I remember how to sail? (Note to self: It’s probably best to not share imposter syndrome self-doubts with the crew. As I always say, some things are better left unsaid.)

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While the term “gearing up” is a nice turn of phrase, it’s typically interchangeable with “getting ready” or “preparing.” However, for Rhett and me “gear” has meaning. We’re each checking two bags to Athens, one with clothes and personal items, the other with gear. While both of our second suitcases are full of items hard to find in Greece, mine is haphazardly stuffed with boat parts specific to Hazel James while Rhett’s is carefully organized with day to day items that make cramped life on a small boat easier.

In the early 2000s when our family of four lived in India for a year, friends back home wanted to send us a care package and emailed asking what we wanted most from the US. Instead of an expected request of exotic goods, they received Colleen’s laconic reply: Ziploc bags. While ostensibly available in India, we tried them and they were different—thinner, the zip seal lasted once or twice, and they often leaked right out of the box. Sure, I guess it helps to be open minded when traveling but sometimes you just need a bag you can trust. Fast forward 20 years and when I peer in Rhett’s gear suitcase I see…Ziploc-brand Ziploc bags. They made the list last summer after a couple failures of Grecian knockoffs in Hazel’s refrigerator led to messy clean ups compounded by limited fresh or hot water with which to do the cleaning. Perhaps the little things in life really don’t change.

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Years ago, a colleague of mine and his wife took a sabbatical that included a monthlong apartment rental in Paris. When he returned and we were catching up, I was smitten by his descriptions of the two of them not just visiting Paris but, for a short time, becoming threads in the fabric of the city. As he talked, my mind painted fantastical scenes on that canvas. While the Louvre, Versailles, Arc de Triomphe, and other must-see destinations were in my frame, they were in the dappled, Impressionistic background. The foreground, in crisp Realism, was a workaday café, a boulangerie with fresh baguettes, and a fromagerie with the essence of every French cheese imaginable wafting onto the street.

Early in our relationship, I had told Rhett of this dream. She, being an all-in sucker for romance, latched on to the idea like Sunny on a bone. Long story short, in the fall of 2022 she made that dream real for us and that month of our lives together was magical.

This spring our itinerary echoes our Parisian fall. After several days in Athens to check on Hazel James, we’re off to Istanbul, Türkiye for the month of April. As opposed to our one-bedroom in Paris, we’ve now got an extra bedroom for visiting family and friends.

Why Istanbul? Why not? Like Paris, it’s a place neither of us have been. And, as highlighted in our last post, as we gotten to know Venetian and Grecian history better, Istanbul calls to us as a gateway to the East.

Our plan after that is to return to Athens and experience Greek Orthodox Easter in early-May with our fr-amily (portmanteau of friends who are family), then splash Hazel James and start sailing. While we had considered heading west this summer, laying in an ultimate course towards the Caribbean’s Windward Islands, when we looked at our last summer’s track in the Aegean Sea, we realized how much we haven’t seen. Rhett and I both turn 60 this year and know that when we eventually turn west, we’ll never be here again…at least not in our own boat.

So now the current summer sailing plan is to complete a clockwise circuit of the Aegean, beginning and ending in the Athens area—8:00 on the clock face. We’ll first make our way northwards past Mount Olympus towards Greece’s second largest city of Thessaloniki (namesake of The Bible book Thessalonians), then east along the north coast of the Aegean and into Turkish waters. Near Ancient Troy, we will turn south along the Turkish coast and finally back west returning to Athens in the fall.

Happy is the man, I thought, who, before dying, has the good fortune to sail the Aegean sea.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

…That’s the plan anyway. However, as it’s said, “Man plans and God laughs.” Or, as a nod to the ancient Greeks, “Man plans and the gods laugh.”

Thanks for reading and please stay tuned for all things Istanbul coming in future posts.

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Corrections and clarifications on our last post:

Research and proofreading are Achilles’ heels for me. While I let Rhett review all draft blog post’s pictures prior to publication (it’s a southern sensibility thing, darlin’), she doesn’t read the text before posting. After reading our previous post, she astutely pointed out that I mistakenly referred to Brad Pitt’s character in the movie Troy as Hercules when it was really Achilles. Paris’ arrow stings.

Rhett also commented, that in my picture of art imitating life or life imitating art, some readers might not understand that the “woman” I’m sitting next to is a wax figure. (I was originally going so say “…is a wax ‘dummy.’”, but that would just dig my hole deeper.) Rhett pointed this out because she first noticed the art as she was checking in to the hotel. It took her several furtive glances to discern that “she” wasn’t real.

If you’re paying attention to our tracker on the HJ Sailing homepage, please disregard the long great circle hop from Athens to Delray Beach, Florida that I inadvertently added. While we were back in the US, I acquired a new communications device for Hazel and of course brought it to Greece in my gear suitcase. It uses cellular connections to automatically update the tracker map and saves the substantial monthly cost of a satellite connection when coastal sailing. In doing the shore-based set-up of the unit and connecting it with our tracking page back in Florida, I found it worked so well that it automatically updated the tracker to our location. I’ll get it corrected at some point.

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Perhaps you’ve been wondering what Sunny, Rhett, and Dan have been up to—particularly since our last post was over five months ago. Or, perhaps I flatter myself with self-importance and you’ve moved on and forgotten all about us. Or—most likely—you have given us the grace of time. Regardless, I’m happy to report that we are here (here being South Florida) and we’re gearing up and packing for our 2024 travel and cruising season. More on the future in our next post; for now, let’s agree to be stuck in the past—the past of October, 2023…

As I collect myself and put pen to paper, in an attempts to describe our geographical, cultural, historical—and just plain fun—land-voyaging this past fall, my mind drifts astern even further, to our 2022 terra firma travels. On one hand, the two autumnal land voyages were so similar—on the other hand, they couldn’t have been more different.

The impetus for the travel was the same. Hazel was safe and secure (last year in the water in Greta, Italy; this year “on the hard” in Lavrion, Greece). We were already in Europe and we were curious to see more—especially destinations that for various reasons were difficult or impossible to reach in our sailing.

Our fall 2022 travel was an international three-course feast featuring the Italian antipasto-cities of Rome, Sienna, and Milan, our plat principal of a month in Paris, and pudding-sweep through Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England.

While last year’s Dickensian Christmas in London was magical— complete with fireplaces, wood smoke, Yorkshire pudding, snow, and traditional carols—this year we yearned to be home for the holidays. Therefore, for our fall 2023 travels we embraced the Greek culinary spirit and opted for simpler and lighter fare that would get us home in time for American Thanksgiving and Christmas. As far as we can tell, the Greek epicurean ethos is to start with the best ingredients and “don’t mess ‘em up” (and when in doubt, wrap it in phyllo, bake it, drizzle honey on it, and finish with crumbled feta).

As the pages turned and the book grew thin on our 2023 sailing season both Rhett’s and my thinking was united on our upcoming fall travel. While we had one vision, the two of us had vastly different but complimentary foci. I was consumed by all things Hazel—what we needed to do to winterize her, the professional work we’d have done on her over the winter, etc. Rhett turned her turrets towards planning our autumnal travel. Given the bookends of Hazel’s early October haul-out and our early November flights home we had a month to work with. After much banter, we decided on Athens for a base of operations with excursions to Venice, the Grecian islands of Hydra and Venice, and a driving circumnavigation of the Peloponnese Peninsula.

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Venice made the list for several reasons. In addition to its unabashed romance, there’s the real possibility that “The Floating City” might sink before Rhett had had a chance to see it. An additional, and wholly unexpected, rationale was that throughout our summer 2023 sailing in Ionian and Aegean Greek waters, we had tasted an unmistakable Italianate influence on the Greek islands—from architecture, to food, to street names. This piqued our curiosity and as we read and researched we discovered that all roads do not necessarily lead to Rome. Many lead to Venice. Perhaps as a foreshadow, instead of “…roads…,” I should say “…all maritime trade routes…” but I’d lose the turn of phrase. We wanted to experience the source.

In our historical digging we had unearthed a gem of a vocabulary word, “thalassocracy”—a colonizing state that concerns itself with coastal territories and has little or no interest in adjacent, landlocked interiors.

During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the Republic of Venice’s thalassocracy stretched from its namesake city at the northernmost extreme of the Adriatic Sea, southeast down the Adriatic and Ionian Seas and eastward into the Aegean Sea linking it with Asia.

While the Venetian merchants of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance were brilliant businessmen (in the 1400s Venice was the richest city in Europe), Venetian trade dominance was largely due to its strategic location and that location was picked for life-and-death survival, not trade. While many factors contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, the precipitating “straw that broke the camel’s back” was the invasion of Germanic tribes in 400-500 AD. In an effort to escape these Barbarian Invasions a local people known as the Veneti fled the mainland and sheltered in the backwater islands of a shallow swampy lagoon in the at the head of the Adriatic Sea. Centuries later, this defensive gambit gave the Venetians a city-state ideally situated to bridge trade between east and west. To the northwest of Venice were inland connections to wealthy European cities—cities with gold and silver, and eager for exotic goods from the East. To the southeast was a stepping-stone path of islands, coastlines, and harbors leading to the Silk Road and Persia, India, and China. Thus, the Venetian thalassocracy and resulting Italianate influence in Greece.

A thought to ponder about this trade route is that, while it looks obvious and neat-and-tidy on a modern map, it’s still a 1,300 nautical mile (~1,500 land mile) one-way voyage from Venice to Constantinople (today’s Istanbul and the capital of both the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires). While European Atlantic mariners had a much longer voyage from Western Europe to the New World (about 3,500 nautical miles), they had the benefit of reliable seasonal winds and powerful ocean currents. On the other hand, Venetians sailors, with fickle Mediterranean zephyrs and no currents, primarily rowed. Yes their galley’s were outfitted with auxiliary sails but the sails were only used when the wind was favorable and even then the rowing would continue and sails merely gave an added boost (akin to a modern sailing yacht motor-sailing).

In addition, while there’s the trope of the “galley slave” literally slaving away at the oars with some brawny, whip-wielding sadist for motivation, Venetian rowers were generally freemen and considered professional sailors. Venice had a well-developed system for recruiting and training rowers and it was a skilled and respected profession.

While I had thought that our sailing in the Mediterranean was challenging, it’s boggling to me to think of rowing a large craft thousands of miles—not only the physicality of the act but also the logistics. A transatlantic merchant vessel of the day would have a total crew of 30-100 sailors to sail, navigate, and keep the boat maintained. By comparison, in addition to a similar complement of officers, sailors, and soldiers a Venetian galley would have 200-400 rowers. I know what it takes to provision Hazel for two and a half people (two people and a dog), and I have the benefits of a propane stove, refrigeration, grocery stores dotting the coast, a water maker, a global supply chain of food, and a plethora of canned and dried options. It’s crazy to imagine how Venetian merchants and captains kept hundreds of free sailors fed and hydrated when they’re spending hour per day on the oar. From this line of thought, it’s clear that Venice’s thalassocracy—its stepping stones to Asia—were not just ports of refuge in case of storms. They were vital “refueling” points (the fuel being food and water for hundreds of sailors).

Our travel to Venice was all we hoped it would be, and more. The sights, the food, the people, and the history—but soon we were winging our way back to our Athenian “base camp.” As our plane lifted off from the Marco Polo airport (yes, Marco Polo was Venetian), we looked out the window a long time as the lagoon that encircles Venice disappeared astern. If we thought getting to the airport, through security, and on to our two-hour flight was exhausting, we contemplated the effort required to row the entire Adriatic, around the Peloponnese Peninsula to Athens.

Post cards from Venice…

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After several restful days at our Athenian base camp, we were off via ferry to the islands of Hydra and Crete. “Hydra,” pronounced EEE-dra, with an ever so slight rolling of the “r;” and the Anglicized “Crete” silencing the second “e” so the word rhymes with “feet.” (With “Crete,” Greeks will pronounce both vowels and often spell it “Kriti” in our Latin alphabet. Similar to Hydra, they’ll also give a slight roll to the “r.”)

At this point in the blog post, an astute reader may be thinking, OK, if Dan and Rhett are such avid sailors, why are they taking ferries to these islands and not sailing there? It’s a fair question, with a couple answers. First, Hydra—being peaceful, picturesque, and only 35 nautical miles south of Athens—is an exceedingly popular port-of-call for Athens-based charter yachts. While there’s nothing wrong with “popular,” on Hydra there are few anchorages or safe harbors and thus in the high-season yachts are usually tied up three and four deep on the town quay. While we could have dealt with all of that, we also wanted to be able to explore the island and with our crew of two that would mean leaving Hazel unattended which didn’t seem like a good idea. Therefore we opted for our visit via ferry and in the shoulder-season of October when the weather was still good but the crowds had thinned out. (Think of it as taking a taxi downtown, rather than having to look for parking for your own car.)

With Crete, while the conclusion to visit via ferry was the same, the rationale was different. Crete is 5 times further south of Athens than Hydra (150 nautical miles vs. 30) and while sailing there in Hazel James would have been a lot of fun with the Aegean’s prevailing north wind, it would have been an arduous beat back upwind after the visit. (If a modern sailor tells you they “sailed” from Crete back to the Greek mainland, question them carefully. What they probably really are saying is that the motored upwind for 24 hours…something we avoid like the plague.)

So, on an azure autumn Mediterranean morning, we boarded a fast ferry in Athens’ bustling port city of Piraeus and just an hour later we were entering Hydra-Town’s compact harbor from the west. The approach reminded us of an ancient Greek theater, with the harbor’s water as the stage and the town acting as rows of seats radiating up and away from the harbor.

As the captain of the Flying Cat 5 eased to the pier, mates tossed lines to the dockhands and the dockhands warped her the final few feet. As we disembarked the gangway became our magical time machine. Earlier that morning we had embarked in the gritty port city of Piraeus, its waterways gunwale-to-gunwale with container ships, tankers, cruise ships and ferries. Like Athens, Piraeus’ avenues are choked with cars, busses, motorbikes, and ubiquitous scooters—the busses belching clouds of diesel soot, older scooters burping puffs of blue two-stroke smoke. The contrast of Hydra was a literal breath of fresh air as the entire island is blissfully motor vehicle free.

Dockside, our first sight was of porters with specially adapted long-handled, pneumatic wheeled carts competing with muleteers to transport luggage to hotels.

Hydra’s freedom from internal combustion, is a happy coincidence of history, geography, and culture. Historically, Hydra’s high water mark occurred during the 1821-1830 Greek War of Independence when Hydriot merchants and sailors fought the Ottoman Navy and played a crucial role in securing Greek independence. (As background, Greece was under Ottoman domination for four centuries, from the mid-15th century until the Greek War of Independence.)

The ragtag Greek “Navy” was largely a collection of cargo vessels donated by wealthy Greek merchants and woefully outnumbered and outgunned by the Ottoman mariners. As a 19th century “David,” challenging their Goliath overlords, Hydriot sailors perfected the “fireship” technique. First they’d load a decrepit merchant vessel to the gunwales with flammable materials such as tar and pitch. Then, a small crew would sail her right at an Ottoman warship. When in close range, the skilled Greek sailors would light their ship ablaze and—only when collision was imminent—attempt to escape on a lifeboat. As you might imagine, Ottoman sailors would panic at the sight of floating inferno bearing down on them. Even if the fireship didn’t successfully collide with an Ottoman ship and burn it to the waterline, it would often force the larger Ottoman fleet to break ranks in an effort to dodge the floating conflagration, thus making their fleet much easier to attack via conventional maritime tactics. It’s such a poignant David-and-Davy story of ingenuity, resourcefulness, and skill—a “David” delivering the Goliath of brute-strength to Davy Jones’ Locker (sailor parlance for the bottom of the sea).

Back to automobile-free Hydra, this maritime focus of the Hydriots resulted in the few harbors of the island being well developed while the interior of the island laid fallow. Who needs roads when you’ve got the sea?

Geographically, the island doesn’t lend itself to the wheel. What roads and streets there are, are punctuated with cobblestone steps to traverse the steep-to gradient. Sure-footed mules and donkeys put the automobile to shame in Hydra.

Finally—and culturally—as automobile use exploded on mainland Greece, Hydriot’s understood what a gem they held in their hands and decided to instantiate their freedom from the internal combustion engine in their island’s laws.

After several blissful days of non-mechanized Sabbath on Hydra, we were off to Crete. Given the distance we had to cover, we took a slower night-ferry that departed in the evening and arrived in Crete the next morning.

While, Rhett has hours of “sea time” as a passenger on cruise ships, I was a newbie to the equivalent of leaving the driving to someone else. It made me nervous so as we settled into our modest cabin for the night I took no chances.

Coming from Hydra what we first noticed about Crete is its size. On 11-mile long Hydra, you never forget that you’re on an island. Conversely, by area, Crete is the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean (behind Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, and Corsica). With its 140 miles east-to-west, Crete feels like and is a land unto itself. It’s a fitting paradigm as culturally and historically it’s distinctive from the mainland. While mainland Greece overthrew the Ottomans in the aforementioned Greek War of Independence (1821-1830), Crete did not win its independence until 1913, nearly 100 years later and just 10 years before the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

One highlight of our trip to Crete was a daylong hike down the Samaria Gorge, the longest gorge in Europe. It began with a predawn coach (bus) pick-up from our hotel. The coach took us to the top of the gorge where we enjoyed a rustic breakfast before hitting the trail. It was then quite literally “all downhill from there”—a rugged 10 miles and a descent of 4,000 feet to the Mediterranean Sea.

Another highlight of our time in Crete was a visit the now-tranquil Arkadi Monastery, the site of the bloody Arkadi Holocaust. The monastery was likely founded during the Byzantine period in the 5th or 6th century AD and has been a beacon of the Orthodox Christian faith through the centuries.

The Arkadi Holocaust happened in 1866. As a reminder, the rest of Greece had won its independence from the Ottomans in 1830 while Crete would not overthrow the Ottomans until 1913. Although the Ottomans knew the military and commercial strategic value of Crete (especially after the stinging insult of losing mainland Greece) their brutal vice-grip on the island did not quell the Cretan spirit and skirmishes and minor rebellions were frequent. By the mid-1800s the Ottoman overlords had had enough of the Cretan misbehavior and the Arkadi Monastery embodied the island’s and Orthodox Christian spirit and resistance. In 1866 the Turks attacked the monastery and the Cretans who had taken shelter there, the result is best described by Victor Hugo…

We know that name, Arkadi, but we know little of the event. Here are the precise and largely unknown details. At the Arkadi Monastery, on Mount Ida, which was founded by Heraclius (Hercules), 16,000 Turks, attack 197 men, 343 women, and children. The Turks have 26 cannons and two howitzers. The Greeks 240 rifles. The battle lasts two days and two nights; the monastery is riddled with 1,200 bullets; a wall collapses, the Turks enter, the Greeks continue fighting, 150 rifles are disabled, the fighting goes on for six hours in the cells and stairwells, and there are 2,000 corpses in the courtyard. Finally, the last resistance is suppressed; the victorious Turks swarm the monastery. Only one room, the gunpowder magazine, remains barricaded, and in this room, near an altar, at the center of the group of children and mothers, a man of 80 years, a priest, Abbott Gabriel, is praying. Outside the fathers and husbands are being killed, but not to be killed, will be the miserable fate of these women and children, who are promised to two harems. The door, battered with an ax, will give in and fall. The old man takes a candle from the altar, looks at these children in these women, tips, the candle into the gunpowder, and saves them. A terrible action, an explosion, rescues the vanquished, the agony becomes a triumph, and this heroic monastery, which fought like a fortress, dies like a volcano.

Victor Hugo, Correspondence. Published in “Kleio” newspaper in Trieste, Italy, March 1867.

Although Victor Hugo started writing the fictional Les Miserables in the 1840s and published it in 1862 (five years before his factual account of the Arkadi Holocaust) parallel themes—and even word choices, like “barricade” and “miserable”—ring through both works. Today, as I peck away on my keyboard, I read and reread Hugo’s line, “…this heroic monastery, which fought like a fortress, dies like a volcano.” and am jealous. Someday, maybe someday, I’ll reach that concise perfection of word.

While the Cretans may have lost the battle, it was a decisive inflection-point in their eventual winning of the war. European newspapers picked up the story and the event drew international attention to the Cretan cause (although it would take another 46 years to secure their full independence from the Ottoman Empire).

As Rhett, Sunny, and I leisurely strolled through the stone archways and heavy wooden doors, bathed in the autumnal afternoon Mediterranean sunlight, we were overwhelmed with gratitude for our “brand” of travel. Prior to setting foot on the monastery grounds, we had no idea of this history. Candidly, we’d just heard that there were “great monasteries” on Crete worth visiting. We quickly researched a few and picked Arkadi. Our lack of planning and spontaneity was rewarded by a memory and a myth of the human condition of struggle, resistance, perseverance, and ultimate victory that we will carry forever.

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After another recharge in Athens (courtesy of our good friend Panos, and his gracious family), we were off on a 12-day, 750 mile driving tour of the southern Greek mainland and the Peloponnese Peninsula.

As we set forth (breathing a sigh of relief when we escaped Athenian traffic with our rental car unscathed) I’d characterize our mood as satisfied we were on a circuit of the Peloponnese but not thrilled at the prospects. Kind of like sitting down to a nice big bowl of broccoli: I know this is going to be good for me, but I’d really rather be eating something else. Besides, we’d been feasting on Venice, Hydra, and Crete for the last several weeks. We weren’t particularly hungry for more travel. However, if my mom had taught me anything, it was to finish everything on my plate. Of our own free will, we had served ourselves up a heaping, 750-mile portion of the Peloponnese and we were going to finish it…the die had been cast.

Throughout our summer of sailing in Greece, new local friends we often comment, “If you’ve only been to Athens, you haven’t been to Greece.” While we found that advice true, we had thought it was only applicable to the iconic islands with their shimmering turquoise water, whitewashed houses, and blue-domed churches. We anticipated this mainland driving tour to be character-building, we’d learn a lot, we’d like it but we wouldn’t love it.

Our first stop was Delphi and its eponymous Oracle, the most famous of the ancient oracles. For all its power and mystery in the ancient world, we found it most interesting that an oracle’s predictions, at least the few that survive today, are obtuse, veiled, and can be interpreted in different ways by the person posing the question to the oracle.

As an example of the ambiguity, Croesus, king of Lydia (part of modern-day Turkey) who ruled from 560 to 546 BC asked the Oracle of Delphi if he should invade Persia and the Oracle’s response was:

If you make war on the Persians, you will destroy a great empire.

You’ve got to understand that not only was Croesus a king, at the time he was also one of the richest men on earth and carried the conceit that accompanies great wealth (some things never change). With the Oracle’s prophecy in-hand he promptly invaded Persia, overstretched his army, and was soundly defeated. Only then did he realize that the “great empire,” of which the Oracle foretold, might just have been his own.

It’s important to note that ambiguity wasn’t endemic to the Oracle of Delphi. Oracular legend has it that a general consulted another oracle about his army’s prospects in an upcoming battle and received the oblique answer (roughly translated):

You will go you will return never in war you will perish.

…which could be read as, “You will go, you will return, never in war you will perish.” or “You will go, you will return never, in war you will perish.” Perhaps—in Wheel of Fortune style—the general should have bought a couple commas.

Today, the term “Delphic ambiguity” is often used to describe how economists couch predictions of inflation, economic growth, and monetary policy. Former US Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, famously said, “If you think you understand what I am saying you do not understand what I am saying.”

As a final note on the Oracle of Delphi and oracles in general, it’s important to remember that the rich and famous who posed the questions lavished huge tributes of gold, jewels, statues, and temples and other structures to the oracles. Thus, the oracles were incentivized to not be totally wrong, and to keep the peace and prosperity between city-states and empires so the rich deep-pocketed would continue to be able to pay tributes. “One hand washes the other.” It’s a story as old as the hills.

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After our tour of the Delphi site and its archeological museum, we were off toward the Rion Bridge and Olympia. The Rion Bridge spans the relatively narrow channel at the Gulf of Corinth’s western end. I was curious to see it in the daylight as the last time I had witnessed its bulk was from Hazel James’ deck as I attempted to sail beneath it at 2:00 a.m. on a gusty foreboding night…under spinnaker. Not my best nautical move but I lived to tell the tale, in another blog post someday.

The bridge opened in 2004 and, at the time, was the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world. At 2,250 meters (nearly a mile an a half), it spans the only natural entrance to the Gulf of Corinth. At the other end of the Gulf (the eastern end) is the manmade Corinth Canal that joins the Gulf with the Aegean Sea.

Several hours after paying our bridge-toll and crossing the Gulf of Corinth from north-to-south via the Rion Bridge, we rolled into the town of Olympia, checked into a character-laden mom-and-pop hotel and settled in for a good rest before our next day’s tour or Ancient Olympia.

When I watch the quadrennial games on TV, inevitably the voiceover during the majestic trumpeting theme music introduces the spectacle as the “Modern Olympics.” Although a pleasant turn of phrase, I had never really thought about what it really meant. In addition, I always thought it a bit hollow when the made-for-TV commentators (straight out of central casting) pontificate about how the Olympics unite the world in friendly amateur competition. To me it seemed like “one world” and “amateur” are drowned in a sea of money, advertising, blood doping, geopolitics, and scandal. For someone who often feels he was born too late, my logical assumption was that the Ancient Olympics—in those halcyon days of yore—must have been pure, unadulterated, and totally different than our games.

As it is so often the case, it turns out that things weren’t that simple. Yes, the ancient games were dedicated to Zeus, and yes the coming together of the ancient games did help smooth tensions across the known-world of Greece.

As an aside, it’s important to remember that during much of the Ancient Olympic competitions, Greece was not Greece. It was a loose collection of city-states or poleis (plural of “polis”)—sometimes allies and sometimes adversaries…and of course, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” was as true then as it is today. Alliances and pacts were made and broken in a gristly Grecian Game of Thrones. (An interesting side fact—and linking back to our Delphi visit—while Delphi was a polis like Athens or Sparta, because of the importance of its oracle Delphi was collectively granted a special independent and neutral status, somewhat like a Switzerland in the 20th century.)

However, and like our Modern Olympics, cheaters cheated and when caught were dealt with severely. Sure, there was the garden-variety fraud (like paying off other competitors to lose, bribing judges, etc.), then there was the interesting stuff—like performance enhancing substances. It’s believed that the most common banned substance was animal blood. And just how—you might ask—would one test for banned substances 2,500 years ago? Simple…official urine tasters supposedly could detect if banned animal blood had been drunk by an athlete. If you’re now wondering how one develops the skill to be a urine tester, I’ll leave that to your creativity (WARNING: Some things once imagined can never be unimagined).

Perhaps though the accuracy of an ancient urine tester was less important than the sentinel effect of the testing itself. To that end, it was clear that public shame was a primary deterrent to cheating. While a winning athlete could expect the adoration of his polis, if an athlete was caught cheating couldn’t come up with the cash himself, it was levied on his entire hometown and the polis collectively felt the pain, shame, and humiliation. The revenue from a cheater’s fine was then used to erect a bronze statue of Zeus and on the pedestal of the statue was inscribed the athlete’s name, hometown, and nature of the offense. As another sentinel effect, these statues were strategically positioned along the path that the athletes took on their way into the main stadium.

As a closing note to this chapter and a reminder of how brief our time on this earth is, consider that our Modern Olympics (revived in 1896) have existed for roughly one-tenth of the duration of the Ancient Olympics (776 BC to 393 AD).

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After a some pampering in Pylos and Kardamyli, and a stop in Kalamata, we found ourselves on a day-long drive of the stunning Mani Peninsula. If you ascribe to form following function, then it’s an easy hop to imagining how the peninsula’s rugged geography instilled a fierce tribal and clannish independence into the Maniots (the people of the Mani Peninsula). While the rest of Greece fell to the Ottoman Empire in the mid-15th century AD and would remain subjugated for four centuries, the Mani Peninsula remained the “wild west” of Greece and was never conquered by the Turks.

The chieftain Petros Mavromichalis (1765-1848) embodied the Mani spirit. After he rebuked the Ottoman’s offer to buy his loyalty, Mavromichalis hoisted the banner of rebellion in Kalamata in 1821. The tales of his and the Maniot’s resistance to the Ottomans inspired the rest of the nascent Greek nation in a widespread uprising that eventually threw out the Ottoman overlords and paved the way for an independent Greek state.

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After our days of westward and southward exploration to the fin du monde of the Mani, we headed in the opposite directions to complete our Peloponnese circuit.

In our driving south we had noticed that the olive trees were laden and day-by-day the fruit was ripening. As we turned northward, we witnessed the beginning of the harvest.

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Our next stop (now on the western coast of the Peloponnese Peninsula) was the town and island of Monemvasia. While long Greek names are intimidating (especially when written in Greek script), the good news is that the language is very phonetic and most every letter gets a sound. Perhaps that’s why when we check into Greek hotels, clerks generally read Mr. and Mrs. Coate on the reservation (silent “e”), and then address us as “Mr. and Mrs. co-AHH-tay” (in France, we often got “Monsieur et Madame co-TAY”). The same goes for Monemvasia…don’t be scared to sound it out: moh-nehm-VAH-see-ah. If you’ve studied any Latin and squint at it, you may be able to see the Greek portmanteau within the name: Mone being single or sole, and emvasia being entrance or passage. One bird’s eye view is all that’s needed to understand the name.

The couple hundred yard causeway was originally constructed in the 6th century AD during the Byzantine Era and technically made the island a peninsula. Down through the ages its location and fortifications were vital to the powers that-be, from the Byzantines, to the Franks and Venetians (yes, Monemvasia was part of the Venetian Thalassocracy), to the Ottoman Empire, and eventually the Greeks. In the modern age—between the unified and relatively peaceful Greek state (established in 1821) and long-range shipping not dependent on frequent ports of call for provisions, water, and fuel—the town has lost its strategic importance and the area’s economy is almost exclusively tourist based. The good news is that that has kept the narrow cobblestone streets and Byzantine and Venetian architecture largely intact.

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Our next and final overnight stop on the journey was a “three’fer” of Nafplio, Epidaurus, and Mycenae (OK here’s a test of your Greek phonetic pronunciations: naf-LEO, epi-DAV-ros, my-SEE-nay).

Interestingly, at the end of the Greek War of Independence, Nafplio was the named the provisional capital of the newly formed Greek nation. (In 1843 and by democratic vote the Greeks moved their capital to Athens.) Nafplio was initially chosen because of its central location, port access, and fortifications (in case those pesky Turks tried any funny business). To me, the best thing about the forts that surrounded the city were the murder holes.

No no no, I know what you’re thinking and a “murder hole” is neither the newest Nafplian dance club nor the entrance to a communal living bird house for crows. A murder hole is an ominous opening directly above a fortified gate. In the off-chance that invaders reach a fort’s gate, they’ve got to contend with the murder hole. If the defenders are prepared, they’ll had cauldrons of boiling water, scalding oil, or even molten lead, waiting to “welcome” the raiding army.

Perhaps it’s borderline macabre (or maybe not even borderline) that I like to pause directly under murder holes and ponder what might have happened in that very spot. The heavens open and fire and brimstone rain upon the marauding vanguard. I get a chill, and move on.

We used our Nafplian local-base of operations to launch day trips to Mycenae and Epidaurus. A week earlier, when on the island of Crete, we had toured the ruined palace of Knossos, the center of the ancient-ancient Minoan civilization (approximately 2,600 to 1,400 BC). As the Minoan civilization declined the Mycenaeans rose to prominence as the next great early Greek civilization. The Mycenaeans’ capital was Mycenae and if you ever saw the movie Troy (with a buff Brad Pitt as Hercules) or read Homer’s Iliad, the Mycenaeans, led by their King Agamemnon, organize an alliance of ancient empires and city-states to attack Troy. As side notes, Odysseus was the king of Ithaca, was persuaded to join with Agamemnon in the siege of Troy, and Homer’s Odyssey is the story of Odysseus’ arduous odyssey home to Ithaca from Troy. The island of Ithaca is in the Ionian Sea (west of mainland Greece) and I documented our visit there in this previous post (see sub-title “The Odyssey to Odysseus’ Home”). Also, the besieged city of Troy is on the eastern Aegean Sea and we plan to sail there this summer…stay tuned.

Over the summer Rhett and I had both read Irving Stone’s excellent biographical novel The Greek Treasure which chronicles Sophia and Henry Schliemann (she Greek and he German), and their discoveries and excavations of both Troy and Mycenae. With the story freshly embossed on our minds, us seeing Mycenae in person was a special thrill (especially knowing that Troy was in our future). Sunny didn’t get nearly as much out of the visit as she had just skimmed the book’s Cliff’s Notes (lazy dog).

Early the next morning we were off to tour the ancient city of Epidaurus. Although known in ancient times as a center for healing with its Sanctuary of Asclepius (son of Apollo and the god of healing and medicine), today Epidaurus is known for having the best preserved ancient theater in the world. Seeing the 15,000 seats in the morning mist was breathtaking, as was its acoustics as demonstrated below.

As yet one more—and final—aside, as he was the god of healing and medicine Asclepius is depicted as a wise, bearded man with a staff. A serpent is coiled around his staff. Given that snakes disappear into the ground for long periods of time and then reemerge (we would say to hibernate, ancient Greeks would say to visit the underworld), snakes in ancient Greece were associated with wisdom, rebirth, and transformation—and thus—medicine and Asclepius. The modern caduceus (our symbol of medicine) with its snakes wrapped around a staff is a descendent of Asclepius’ imagery. It’s fascinating to think also that, thanks to the Greeks, we have both the ancient mythology of medicine and the Father of Medicine. It was the man (not god) Hippocrates who revolutionized the practice of medicine by emphasizing observation, clinical experience, and ethical principles.

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Upon departing Nafplio we pointed our trusty rental car north and across the Isthmus of Corinth and back to Athens. On the isthmus we made a quick stop in Ancient Corinth. The city is the namesake of The Bible books First and Second Corinthians, and Paul’s Letters to the Corinthians. In Paul’s day, Corinth was a rough-and-tumble sailor’s town and the apostle did his best to encourage the Corinthians to chart a more wholesome course.

While on the road from Corinth to Athens, it occurred to us that this was the final few hours of our final journey of the season. Our excited conversation bounced back and forth like a tennis volley from the immediate past to the imminent future. Behind us was a collage of indelible images of the Peloponnese and how it had far exceeded our expectations, and launched itself to the front of the pack as our favorite place in Greece. Ahead of us was was a vision of our transatlantic flight and, reunification with family and friends. While it felt good to know that home was still there, and we’d soon sleep in our own bed—it felt even better to know that when we got there, we’d be changed. Different people from when we had set forth. Indelibly enriched for all we had seen, learned, and experienced.

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This post is dangerously close to its Plimsoll line so I’ll end it here and not even broach the topic of what comes next (aside from the few teasers above). Thanks as always for reading. Your support means the world to us as we traverse it. Please keep your eye out for our next post describing our plans for the 2024 season.