Mainland Greece and Evia Island

Evia island is the second largest Greek island, Crete being the largest. It runs North South roughly paralleling the Greek Mainland down to Athens with a really tight little gap between the island and mainland at Khalkis which I will be telling you all about soon enough.

This map covers the remainder of our journey this season but I won't be covering it all in this post.

Above the northern end of Evia is the Gulf of Volos. All very interesting geography and a nice way to slowly end the season.

We left Skiathos at 11:10 on the 10th September and motor sailed in dreary overcast, windy, cold weather. By the time we reached the planned anchorage, our collective mood seemed to match the conditions.

Vathoudhi was the anchorage we had chosen, it sits in the south eastern corner of the Gulf and looked super protected from the Meltimi.
We felt it was time for an anchorage, a Sally special home cooked meal and a swim.

The reality was quite different. Vathoudhi is a place where SunSail used to have a charter base but now the bay is a place where people leave their boats when they go home to somewhere they live in Europe and it has the feel of a desolate graveyard.

We anchored none-the-less but almost immediately the wind changed direction putting us on collision course with another anchored yacht. An omen. We simply up anchored and headed for another secluded bay a little further south.

Much better... We woke to one of those mornings you could bottle, but in no time another wind shift pushed us into shallow water, so it was time to go.

Volos is a huge city right at the top of the Gulf, read like it was Naples so not for us. We decided that one more stop in the Gulf would do us so we headed for Amaliapolis on the western side. We had no idea what to expect though because detail in this part of Greece is not readily available for some reason?

Well, another little Gem. We met some Athenians who holiday here sitting on the wharf as we docked and they gave us the full rundown. Where to eat, "mention our name", where to shop, where to swim.


We ended up staying two nights.

Something we still struggle with in Greece is the siesta time... We usually arrive in a new place after 2:00pm and of course the place always looks and feels like a ghost town. Everybody is asleep.

There always seems to be way too many Tavernas with way too much seating. Then, at around 8:00pm as if out of the woodwork, the population swells to well above what the whole town looks as if it can accommodate!

The Tavernas fill, the playgrounds overrun with hoards of squealing kids and the roads gridlock with cars and scooters??

This town closes off the main drag at 9:00pm so it looked and felt like one big street party going down.