Descents and Climbs
- Alix Titley
- Oct 9
- 7 min read
Updated: Nov 13
I love descending south from Leros, but coming back is often a climb. And a slog. The prevailing summer winds in the Dodecanese are north-westerlies. Sometimes you can get a southerly and hitch a ride back up, but that is not often.
Leaving Leros, we had good, prevailing winds to take us down to Vlichadia, a bay at the south of mountainous Kalymnos, just west of Kalymnos town. Money Penny was already in the bay on one of the four mooring buoys laid by the Paradiso restaurant. There is also space for a few boats to anchor, but when we arrived late in the afternoon, there wasn’t really any obvious spot free, so we went alongside her. It was great to be back on the water. We had left Leros marina as soon as we were able to, but we still had a few outstanding jobs, like installing our solar panels. But first things first – we enjoyed a quick dip to cool off.
Vlichadia is an attractive bay, with high, rocky sides. There are two little beaches, and a handful of tavernas along the shore. There may even be a small grocery store - although I’m not sure if it’s ever been open while we have been there - and the small but excellent, privately-owned maritime museum, set up by the Valsamidis brothers, who were born on the island. Kalymnos was renowned for its sponges, and part of the museum is given over to the sponge-diving industry, with the rest of the space filled with artefacts and creatures from the sea. It is well worth a visit as it is interesting, and at times the exhibits are downright weird.
The other global draw of the island is its vertiginous limestone cliffs. Sometimes you will see tiny figures - mountaineers clinging to the cliff faces. Your feet start tingling, and you are glad it’s them and not you up there, especially exposed to the burning, desiccating sun. There's is a harder climb that our beats up-wind.
It was a brief overnight stop, and the next day saw Missy Bear and Money Penny sail around to Kardemena, on the south coast of Kos. We have only sailed this way around Kos once before, and Kardemena was a new anchorage for Missy Bear. There is a small harbour, but it has a notoriously shallow entrance, and we have never fancied risking getting stuck. So, we stayed in an anchorage just outside, which has good holding, albeit a little exposed to the south and the swell of the odd ferry and ships plying back and forth.
We stayed for two nights. A small group of us went ashore for cocktails and dinner the first evening, and then the next day, we flubbed ashore to pick up a couple of things we’d forgotten, and to have a coffee etc. It’s a pretty town, quite touristy, with some nice shops selling souvenirs, such as much-needed olive-oil shampoo, soap and a sponge for our deck shower. We like to use this on the boat as it doesn’t create as much lather, and you hope it’s more environmentally friendly.
Our journey south continued the next day. We sailed past Nisiros, where Richard and I had first come in 2019 on our second charter out of Kos. The first, in 2015, saw us climb to Patmos and descend back down to Kos, but in 2019 we had booked a one-way, Kos to Rhodes charter, leaving the hard climb back to Kos for the charter company's delivery skipper.
Nisiros is an active volcano and very photogenic, but we all agreed that we’d been there few times since, and so we’d skip it this trip. We continued downwind to Tilos, using just the jib. It’s about 25NM to the main port on the eastern side, a nice sail for us of about 5-6 hours on our small, 7/8ths-rigged, 34m2 piece of cloth. But, its a belter of a sail for Money Penny, whose masthead-rigged genoa is the size of a football pitch.
And sure enough, they were already tied-up alongside the outer wall of the harbour when we arrived. We went alongside them again, as the remaining, stern-to spaces weren’t great options.
Although we have visited Tilos several times, the museum of the dwarf elephants has never been open! But this time we were in luck. Elephant remains have been found on Tilos dating back over 45,000 years. The sea-level was much lower back then, and it is believed that the elephants walked, and swam to the islands, looking for new sources of food. The remains on Tilos indicate that these dwarf elephants are a unique species, and died out about 4,000 years ago. There is no conclusive proof of why they died out, although the common belief is that it was caused by volcanic activity.
A number of skeletons were found in a cave, and it is thought they were sheltering from an eruption, and they became trapped; rather like the human bodies discovered in the boathouses in Herculaneum. It was fascinating, and made all the more interesting by the knowledgeable (and good-looking) young man looking after the museum.
Another of the pleasures of Tilos is searching out the peacocks that strut around a small campsite, and onto the nearby beach on the north of the island. There are a number of nice bays around, and we always enjoy a swim. We are here much earlier in the autumn than usual, the taverna perched next to a fishing harbour was still open. So we had lunch there.
Onwards and downwards (well, southwards) to the small island of Chalki, north-west of Rhodes. This was a very rolly sail, with horrible waves on the quarter. I was relieved to turn the headland and get some respite in the lee. Again, we had been here on our 2019 charter, and it’s an exceedingly pretty harbour. The port builds a temporary (read wobbly) floating pontoon every year for visiting yachts, and we were delighted to see only two yachts there when we arrived. However, it got noticeably busier, as Sundays are a good first-stop for charters out of Rhodes. The increasing number of catamarans always amazes us. A few of those on the ponton, and there is precious little space left for anyone else.
The ‘harbour-master’, who should be there to help incoming yachts, was noticeable by his absence most of the time, and there was some amazing “Hafenkino” as a result. First of all, a large yacht arrived with an Israeli couple trying to park up. She was very slim with bikini bottoms halfway up her pert rear. It necessitated quite a lot of work from the boys to help [Ed, someone had to do it]. Eventually, the harbour master turned up and told them to go out and do it again.
In parallel, a catamaran was trying to park, and the harbour master told them to hurry up as the large Blue Star car ferry was due in. Did I say large? It’s enormous. And there it was. It peeped around the lower headland, and slid into view. And that was the moment the aforementioned yacht decided to come back to the pontoon, bang in front of the car ferry. The port police on the quay went berserk, waving at the yacht to get out of the way. Later on, we saw the harbour master taking some of the boats out and re-parking them.
After Chalki, we started to climb back up north, our route taking us north-east up to the island of Symi. We’ve been to the main town a few times before, but this trip we visited two new ports. The first was the pretty, enclosed anchorage of Panormitis on the south-west corner. Absolutely gorgeous, the anchorage opens up into a sheltered lagoon, and the first thing you see is the stunning Holy Monastery of the Archangel Michael of Panormitis on the quay. We spent a couple of days here, walking, visiting the monastery and, of course, frequenting the delightful café on the quay. It also has a really good bakery with the best spinach pies.
The second was Pedi, which has a sheltered anchorage, a town quay, and fairly new private quay run by a couple of ex-navy security guards, fresh back from pirate duty off Somalia. Money Penny opted to anchor out, although later managed to get a good space on the town quay, but we booked a few days on the marina. This coincided with some forecasted torrential rain, and some quite blowy weather. In fact, we had watched all the charter boats pile back down to Rhodes a day early, they had obviously been called in. We were parked up in front of a flag pole with a large charter company flag, which would blow and wrap around us as we tried to cross our passarelle back to Missy Bear.
Despite the weather, we had a really-fun few days. More sailing chums arrived to share an ouzo fuelled taverna evening. Plus, another boat flying a Cruising Association pennant parked next to us. I would have loved to stay longer, but another period of unsettled weather was coming in, and we decided to leave and start making our way north.
As always, the wind was on our nose as we headed back along the south-side of the Datça peninsula. Finally, we rounded the headland at Knidos, and had an absolutely cracking few-hours sail up Kos. We bailed out of another two-hour tack to the island of Pserimos, and got the sails down to creep into the marina for the night. The wood-fired pizza oven at Skipper’s bar beckoned.
Next morning, we had another exhilarating sail up the east coast of Kalymnos, in a light south westerly that swirled around off the mountains. Just as we entered the narrow gap between islands between Kalymnos and Leros, two small fishing boats pulled across in front of us, one behind another. If that wasn’t bad enough, we first thought that one was towing the other.
The fisherman on the second raft indicated we should go in front, but Richard pointed at our sails indicating that we couldn’t just put our foot down on the gas. The second fisherman slowed down and we eased passed his bow. We didn’t really have much choice.
And within an hour, we were entering our home marina in Leros, to sit out the forecast red weather warnings.
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