Agkistri

All aboard the yacht week express, also known as Medsailors Greek Sailing Week

Today I begin a week long sailing your around 6 of the Greek Islands. I arrived into Athens late last night and enjoyed a wonderful meal of Greek salad (which are enormous portions here) and calamari under the Acropolis. After frantically running around Athens this morning, fixing up life before the Internet becomes non-existent for a week, I arrived at the pier for check-in.

My boat is called … , the skipper's name is Alex, we have 7 girls on board and 1 guy and 5 Australians, 2 New Zealanders and 1 South African make up our crew. We are one of 14 boats headed out for the week, it’s apparently their second biggest week of the season.

I'm bunking with the lovely South African, Whitney, our room is the size of Harry Potter’s bedroom under the stairs, and my bed only twice the size of me. I can’t sit up in bed and I have to crouch and crawl to get into it - definitely not one for one with claustrophobia.

We have two bathrooms and showers on board, a kitchen and small eating area, although we do all of our eating on the deck. At 3pm, with our drinks and snacks safely in the cooler box we head out to our first island, Agistri, it's a three-hour sail.

The water is rather smooth, although probably not smooth enough for day 1 of sailing haha.

Alex tells us that Agistri is famous for pistachios, so of course that’s the first thing I buy when we arrive. They were not as salty as the ones at home and I paid around 2-3 euros for a decent sized packet.

Our first action of the day, once we'd docked, was a swim. Alex pointed out an area where we would avoid poo from docked boats – always a winner – and off we went. The water was so salty! I don’t think it’s that salt at home, but it felt like you were left with a layer of salt in your mouth if you swallowed any.

We were having a great time lounging in the beautiful salty seawater, until we saw a violent murder take place! The local family who were swimming near us had decided to catch dinner I think. With about 15 of us bobbing in the water we watched as the mother emerged from the sea with an octopus wrapped around her hand.

As she tried to pull it off, the octopus latched on as hard and fast as it could, leaving big red welts in its path. When she finally managed to pull off the sea creature she grabbed it by it’s head and stacked violently throwing it into the concrete. Again and again and again!

Cries of shock and horror were coming uncontrollably from our group, wading in the water, unable to look away. After what felt like an eternity the grandma picked it up and washed it in the ocean before pulling apart its head and washing the ink and internal organs in the ocean. We made a quick exit at this point!

Needless to say we were all put off octopus for the rest of our trip haha.

Afterwards I went for a walk around the island. Alex had pointed out some old German bunkers as we sailed in, so I went to explore those and see the area. The environment reminds me of Pallarenda in a way. It’s bush like, but the ocean is right there.

I wandered around for a bit before returning in time for dinner. Tonight we are having a group dinner of sorts, and it’s tapas style. Lots of different plates of local cuisine comes out at us at a rapid pace. We head cheeses, vegetables, seafood (but no octopus), meats and so on. Dessert was fruit.

Tonight we party in an open-air nightclub. I try ouzo for the first time and decide it’s not for me. Right now life feels amazing. It feels like everything that went wrong last year is currently being made up for on my Greek sailing tour! Roll on tomorrow.Read more