The colour comes back

Enki in Mandraki port on Oinoussa island

This is more like it. Our first "Greek" Greek island, the kind they sell in the brochures, where the blues of the sea and sky are just right, the hillsides steep and barren, the fishing fleet cheerful and toy-sized, and nothing is in a hurry except the north-west wind.

View from the deck, with Chios in the distance

We pulled into Mandraki harbour on Oinoussa island just after breakfast. Three yachts were alongside the quay, and by evening we were five. Full-up. The water's so clear under our rudder that I can watch schools of tiny fish swimming by. We're only 10 nautical miles  from the dirty, abandoned municipal "marina" where we spent the previous two nights in Chios, but it feels much further. We're on our way north again. That's what counts most.

On shore, no-one took any notice of our arrival. Oinoussa, a chip off the north-eastern side of Chios, doesn't do tourism per se. Boy racers on 2-stroke motorbikes were tearing up the flat straight next to the quay.  In counterpoint to their frenzy, a man sat on the stone steps next to his tiny boat, whacking his morning catch of calamari. A woman in black leggings worked her way down a very broad set of front steps with a broom. I admired her industry until I realised she was probably staff.  There are quite a few large houses overlooking Mandraki harbour and now that I've got a better idea of who lives on this island I don't expect their mistresses do much sweeping of steps.

Mr Leon Lemos, shipping magnate, sir

Oinoussa is where Greek families with names like Pateras and Lemos, originally come from - families which own a huge chunk of Europe's shipping tonnage. The shipping magnates run their operations from Athens, New York and London and it's only in summer time that they come "home". The village has a locked up feel at the moment - almost that of a gated community. Nobody was looking for our business. We simply weren't of interest. Not family.

There's a smart nautical museum in town which gives you a  picture of how the Oinoussan shipping families built their  fortunes . It wasn't easy to get inside, mind you. We had to rustle up the man with the key who'd taken an early mark (to find a Greek museum with its door open during "opening hours" is something of a miracle). The museum contains models and paintings of the ships which have belonged to, or still belong, to Oinoussian shipping companies. They started with sail, were quick to pick the shift to steam, and still seem to be ahead of the game. They've built a lot of ships (mostly in the US), and lost a lot too. Apparently they are risk-takers, the men from Oinoussa.

Like racehorses - but better earners

What we lingered longest over was a fabulous collection of miniature model ships made in the late 18th and early 19th century by French prisoners of war who were kept in shackles by the English on hulks at Portsmouth. What ingenuity human beings possess for keeping insanity at bay in conditions of extreme deprivation. The prisoners' model ships, the gift of one Antonis S. Lemos, are incongruously exhibited with pairs of duelling pistols and other elegant- looking weaponry as well as a few pottery dishes dating from around 1600 BC. A man with money can spend it on what takes his fancy, and there need be no explanation of the latter.

Models built by French POWs in late 18th cent

Vodia machine (right), rare specimen in Greece

Talking of such things, you'll be wondering about our engine - maybe. Well, the Volvo man from Athens left us in the lurch. Completely. On Sunday night, when we realised he was never coming to Mytilene, we got talking to a local yachtsman, George, from Alternative Sailing,  who put us onto Dimitri, a local (unauthorised) Volvo mechanic who came on board, gave us a better idea of what might be wrong, and then, via George, pointed us in the direction of a Volvo dealer with a Vodia machine. We sailed south 55 miles. I can't say more. It was all very fraught. We stand by our opinion that the east Aegean islands are a black hole for Volvo service.

The fault is in the turbo. We need a new charge air pressure sensor. We'll order that from the UK, and pick it up where we can. Meanwhile, we can use the engine., albeit not at full capacity. To my mind, the diagnosis hardly warranted the kind of anxiety we threw at the situation, but then we weren't to know that, were we?

This beach near Emboreios will be covered in bodies soon

Forest fires destroyed a lot of the mastic trees on Chios in August 2012

Young mastic trees

Mastic (front left) and olives cover south Chios

We had missed Chios on our way north. I'm glad we had a chance to see it after all. It's where Homer was born. Not much sign of Homeric fighting spirit on the island these days. Chios town felt more desperate than Mytilene, its waterfront bars far too empty for comfort.

The tourist draw is  in the south where mastic shrubs grow wild amongst the olives. Mastic is a chewy substance with medicinal properties which I've managed to live in total ignorance of until now - though I recognise it as the origin of the word masticate. It's made from resin which weeps from the mastic shrub when its bark is cut. "Tears of Chios" is another name for it (kind of proprietary). It's been in use for 2500 years for a variety of ailments (Google it) but the Ottoman sultans  prized it as a breath freshener for the girls in the harem, and were prepared to pay over the odds for it. So the mastic-producing villages of Chios - a kind of cartel -  were heavily fortified to keep their chewy gold out of the hands of robbers. From a distance places like Mesta and Olympic are almost indistinguishable from the rocky, scrubby landscape. Inside the villages, people must have lived in almost complete darkness. Their houses let in only a smidgeon of light because the laneways were so narrow and interconnected at both street and roof level. Prosperity at a price.

Wide street in Mesta

Getting a bit tight in Mesta

This isn't a set-up - Olympi resident

Everything to scale - a tiny church in Olympi

Decorative plasterwork in Pyrgi 

I liked the rustic plasterwork on houses and churches at Pyrgi, another of the mastic villages. The motifs and their execution are not especially fine or complex, but to my eye they are as striking as, say, a strong Marrimekko print or a piece of Tongan tapa cloth. Some modern houses at Emboreios, a tiny port a stone's throw from Pyrgi, had the traditional stencil work applied to their new plaster. I liked that too.


We were almost on our own as we wandered through these curious medieval villages. We remembered being in Provence in early summer, and almost drowning in the torrent of tourists rushing through similar cobbled streets. The trickle of visitors to the eastern Sporades islands in mid-June is something to both be grateful for, and to puzzle over.

Mind games in Mytilene

Sappho's poetry on the harbourfront - remember it!

Playing on the foreshore of the old harbour

A year ago today we motored Enki out through the channel linking Port Napoleon, a mosquito-plagued French boatyard, to the Mediterranean sea and turned left for Turkey. Both the weather and the water in the gulf of Fos were dull and flat. Likewise our exhilaration at being finally underway was muted. I remember how much like a jail-break our departure felt. Unreliable, work-shy, mistake-prone tradesmen (apologies to Markus of Bowsprit, he was the exception) had effectively kept us hostage at Port Napoleon for a month, and our state of mind was fragile.

Past the sea wall and across the water there's Turkey

Enki sporting her new summer cover

A lot has happened since then and most of it marvellous. We need no reminding of how fortunate we are and yes, we are still having way too much fun (thanks yet again to Angel Louise for the turn of phrase). But the bizarre plot twists around our Volvo Penta D3 engine strongly remind us of dark days at Port Napoleon. We're playing the waiting game again, and our minds have re-entered crazed hostage mode. When will he call? When will he come? Will he ever come? Will anyone ever come? When will we get out of here?

The marina is a favoured exercise route for Mytilene walkers

Rain on the solar panels - which in sunshine give us all the power we need

A quick note about our beloved D3 engine, which is a marine version of Volvo's sophisticated electronic car engines: it's an EVC-A model, built in 2004, the first in what is now a long series of D3 engines. And there's the rub. The early D3 engine electronic warning sensors keep their secrets very close to their chest. In subsequent models, Volvo Penta has trusted the end-user with more information. So, for example, in the latest EVC-E model, you don't get a bald red warning light, period. It flashes up an error code/s. To the lay person, an error code means zip, but not to a Volvo technician on a phone. He can enter it into his diagnostic software and bingo, here's your diagnosis, or at least a partial diagnosis, and with that you get a mechanic on the job, or at least order replacement parts. 

Alex works the phones

We have fallen into a Volvo service black hole, and after a week in port we still don't know what's wrong with our engine. An Athens-based Volvo agent undertook early in the week to come to Mytilene on Friday with his Vodia machine, but that was washed away by a deluge of "disasters" closer to home. This morning he gave us another undertaking, which we choose to believe. He'll be here tomorrow or Monday, he says.

Ferries come and go daily in Mytilene harbour

We can find no sound reason to leave Mytilene with an instrument panel warning us of a "serious problem". Of course if our lives depended on it we could sail across the Aegean to a workshop in Athens or Volos without turning on the engine. But our lives don't depend on it. We're in a safe harbour here. There are planes flying in and out of the place. Someone will come, one day. Our frustration levels might be reading extreme, but our reason tells us that our insurance company might consider a decision to sail on in the hope that everything will be ok to be an un-necessary risk (reckless behaviour is their terminology) should we need to file a claim - say, if we got caught out in a small harbour with engine failure, there was no help and we rammed our boat or worse still, someone else's. You get to thinking like that. It's all very obsessive and corrosive. A good coffee in town is the best antidote.

The other thing that's been exercising our minds a lot is the notion that Greece is in Europe, for crying out loud. What if this happened somewhere truly "remote"? Is this the right engine for where we are planning to go? (Just for good measure, Alex has taken the bold step of buying electronic cigarettes! Refills should be available everywhere - no?)

The smoke is steam - he's willing, but his habit is an old one 

Can e-cigs unseat the Malboro man? 

The former estate of this derelict mansion is full of new apartments

We're getting to know Mytilene, and we like what we see. Yes, there's rubbish piled up in places you'd rather it wasn't, and business hours are Mediterranean i.e. the working day effectively ends at 2 pm when lovely cooking smells start to compete with the wafts from bad drains. The town - which has a population of about 36,000 people - has a lived-in feel. Students and other young people mill about the cafes on the harbour front and in the back streets, but so do families with kids, and middle-aged couples, and groups of old friends.

For all that we know about the Greek crisis, no-one seems particularly stressed, and people are dressed well. There are a few beggars, and some predatory gypsy kids near the bus station, but Mytilene doesn't feel like a town on its knees. Just before lunchtime, there are swarms of people tearing around its narrow streets on small scooters. They're like wasps which fly at you as you cling to side of buildings - there are mostly no footpaths. Mytilene has surprising and elegant architecture, grand Italianate buildings rather than cubist Greek. In its day you call tell it's been wealthy. Its harbour is not just a quaint fishing port, though it's that too. Every day there are new ships calling,  moving stuff in and out of the island.

Mytilene's church of Agios Therapon

Cherries on main street

Heirloom olive trees are all over the island

Lesvos is a seriously agricultural island - olive oil and ouzo are big business - and tourism is very much a secondary business here. Nobody takes much notice of us, who are so obviously not from the island, though they're friendly enough. Even the neighbourhood butcher speaks a bit of English. He has cousins in Sydney. The guy who delivered our fuel - we are hopeful - was born in Sydney, but he likes it better here, he says.

Most of Stathis' family live in Sydney. He was born there

Lesvos weather is island weather - variable. We love watching the clouds piling up over the Turkish coast - real clouds, not metaphorical ones. But let's talk about those for a minute.

Cloud build-up over Turkey

I started to write a post about what's happening in Turkey now, but I canned it for a couple of reasons. First, I don't think what I know as a result of our few months on the wealthy, western edge of the country adds much to what's being written in the mainstream media. I'm reading the BBC online, and the English version of Hurriyet, a Turkish daily, and we leap on the International Herald Tribune, with NY Times coverage, when we see it. There's good analysis in all these. For non-Turkish speakers, it's a big ask to get a good fix on what's happening. You're just grabbing at hearsay, or a few random conversations, and it's not really good enough. Second, I'm wary of what I write online. We hope to spend another winter in Turkey and I want to keep writing this blog. I don't want to get closed down. That happens in Turkey.

Back to clouds though. Sea Cloud, a sister ship to Enki, has been in Mytilene for a couple of nights.

Sea Cloud (in front) and Enki - the marina in quite empty 

Ian and Cathy Cook

Sea Cloud is owned by another Sydney couple, Ian and Cathy Cook, who bought her shortly before we bought Enki, and also in Europe from Swiss owners.  When we met up with them last year in Gocek, we talked about maybe cruising together up this way this season. They've had a few problems with an alternator, and we're now out of action for a bit, so we're yet to share an anchorage, but this morning they set off for our bay, the bay where we saw the swordfish. We've enjoyed their company while they were here, and as they pulled out of the marina, they spoke confidently of our catching up with them in a few days. You need to believe it.

Like peas in a pod - two HR48s flying the Australian flag

Sea Cloud heads north towards Limnos

Flashes of silver and red

Heading north, with Ormos Neon Liman ahead of us

There was a moment when we seemed to have it together. The water in Ormos Neon Liman, a sweeping dent in the top right hand corner of Lesvos, was so clear that I could see the anchor when it landed on the sandy bottom about 8 metres down. It dug in quickly. We had the bay to ourselves and were savouring that pleasure as the light drained slowly out of the sky.

The wind had dropped and shore sounds came very clearly to us across the water. Birds were making a joyous racket and somewhere far away bell-clanging goats were heading home. From inside the thick curtain of olive trees covering the hills came the voices of a man and a woman tearing strips off each other. Then the domestic was over, just like that. In the village at the end of the bay, someone turned on the red and green lights marking the entrance to the fishing harbour. The men would be home after dark.

We were still thinking about the swordfish. We'd seen him when the afternoon light was bright, about 200 metres from the boat. He'd leapt out of the water, pointed his needle nose straight up to the sky and spun on his tail like a dancer on points.  For a split second, his slender body was a spinning silver rod, hung above the water, and then it splashed down. He made about six leaps and splashdowns. It was incredible. Perhaps he'd been caught on a longline and what we were watching was his dance of death. Surely the little fishing boats out in the bay were too small to haul in a big fish like that....we hoped, against hope, that he had swum free.

The next morning we were ready for an early start. The forecast looked good to sail to Limnos, 60 miles to the northwest, but first we intended to motor, to make some distance west before the wind came in. I remember Alex saying, "Gentlemen, start your engines." He turned the key in the ignition, and waited as usual for the alarm lights to go through their rotation before kicking the engine over. But one light stayed on -  the red triangle with an exclamation mark - and a whining alarm. A quick flick through the manual told us we had a "serious problem". That's all.

Mytilene harbour

So, to cut a long story short, we aborted the passage north, and by evening, were tacking back into Mytilene harbour. There is nothing fun about coming into a small harbour under sail when you don't have the option of turning on your engine. Alex did it extremely well, but he got some practice last season.  I'm over it, just as I'm over the whole rigmarole of trying to find an authorised Volvo dealer who has a diagnostic computer to plug into our electronic engine bits. Without the computer, it's very difficult to know what exactly the problem is.  But it seems that a) there is no authorised Volvo mechanic on Lesvos and b) the authorised Volvo mechanic on the nearest island, Chios, doesn't have a diagnostic computer, and doesn't want to come to Lesvos anyway.

Mosaic floor from the house of Telephos, midtown Mytilene 100-200 AD

Today, which is Sunday, we turned bad fortune into good and visited the archeological museum in Mytiline. It's closed during the week because there's no money to pay for staff. We think the council must have no money to pay for rubbish collection and weed spraying either because Mytilene's streets are very unkempt.

Sixty years ago a lot of people from this island migrated to Australia, and apparently the story is starting again. A liquor shop owner, an affable man of about 50, asked us how much he would have to pay to rent a single room in Australia - he was thinking of going there. A friend who was there already had told him  you could earn $30 an hour. His wife and daughter were against the idea,  he said, but they'd built a new house seven years ago and now he couldn't afford the payments and taxes on it, and there were no buyers even at a bargain price. Everyone else was trying to sell too. As for business  - "look at my stock", he said. His shelves had missing teeth. Like Greece itself, he has a dire cash flow problem. He feels like a marked man, he told us. We bought a Greek sparkling wine on his recommendation. All we want now is a good reason to drink it. No flashing lights please.

A commemorative service on main street Mytilene