Wednesday 21 June 2017 – Corinth

It has been quite a day.  As you can see we made it through the Corinth canal.

We started off early from Korfos.  I was nervous about everything.  First I was convinced that the boat next to us had crossed our anchor.  But no, the anchor came up with no trouble and clearly had dug in well and it brought up a full anchor of muddy sand.  So we can say that Korfos has very good holding.

The weather was a bit of a disappointment insofar as it did not come up to the forecast which was for virtually no wind.  What we had was a 4 gusting 5 on the nose!  Luckily the sea was not at all choppy and so it was not uncomfortable.  We got to the canal much sooner than we expected.  Again I was nervous about the arrangements to get consent to go through.  But Richard had sussed out right.  About three miles out we called the Canal and they took note of our details and asked us to call up when we were within a mile of the entrance.  We did that and were asked to come into the breakwater and tie up to the harbour wall right away to pay the fee (which was over 150 Euros).  We had a little trouble tying up to the wall, not helped by 15-17 knots of wind on the nose.  A skipper off a Turkish Yacht came to help, but he failed to secure the lines we passed to him and we had to keep pulling in and fending off our bows.  But without damage we finally secured ourselves and Richard went to pay.  The book suggested that you could queue for up to three hours to get through, so I sat down with my newspaper on the iPad to read.  But it wasn’t ten minutes later that the Port called us up on the radio and told us to be ready to follow and cargo ship through.  So off we went.

The journey all went very smoothly.  The canal is weird.  It is dug very deep into limestone cliffs.  It is also quite shallow with only 7 meters depth meaning that no really big ships can go through.  So much to our surprise the main traffic seemed to be yachts.  It took about half an hour to get through.  I hope I got a few interesting photos.

We had decided to go to Corinth town after the canal.  That has been another experience.  The pilot book refers to a yacht harbour, which can be very busy.  But it is nothing like that.  The harbour looks like it has been abandoned.  There is no one organizing it and most of it is empty.  There are pontoons with buoys holding lines for small boats, though most of them are empty.  There are a few walls and two hammerheads where you moor alongside.  As we come in to see where to go a man shouts at us from the sea wall.  It is clear that he is not officially in charge of the harbour.  He is just one of those people we have come across before who help boats moor and expect a small fee.  He directs us to one of the hammerheads and takes our lines.  It was worth the 5 euros we gave him.  A few other boats have come in and gone alongside the wall.  Some larger boats including an Oyster are alongside in the main harbour which also seems empty.

It is hot so we just stay on board and get a bit of breeze.  At about 5pm we decide to go off to the town.  What we want to do here is to go to the Archeological site of Ancient Corinth.  We know from the pilot book that there is a bus that goes there, but we have no idea where the bus stop is or what the timetable is.  But with luck we find the bus stop and a small bus office where the girl in charge speaks English and tells us the times of the buses going and coming back.  So we will go tomorrow morning.

The town is modern with wide avenues.  But it is clearly suffering financially.  Unlike to the islands and the coast towns not many people speak English.  A lot of shops are shut down and we have been approached by beggars.  We expected a bit of that in Athens, but did not see it at all.

We have had dinner on the boat using our BBQ.  Much better than trying to cook below where at 9:30opm the temperature in the saloon has just dropped below 30C!