No one slept well last night and everyone was late to rise. The crew considered mutiny, but we decided we would give our captain a second chance.
After breakfast we lowered the dinghy because we wanted to go explore the Temple of Poseidon. In the Cyclades the sailboats don’t tow their dinghy like in other places we’ve been, rather the dinghy is lashed to the deck. So this was our first opportunity to lower the dinghy. Luckily there is a halyard which we can attached to the dinghy to raise it up using a power winch. We performed the task easily. We all loaded into the dinghy which is quite small and rated for just 4 people (we all had our life jackets on just in case. It was fine and we didn’t wear life jackets after that.)
Our cruising guide didn’t tell us where to go ashore and there wasn’t a dinghy dock. We decided to beach the dinghy next to one of the resorts. We had a little trouble finding the trail up to the temple but after asking at the resort we were on our way. It was about a 10 minute walk.
The temple was built the same year as the Parthenon. Sixteen of the Doric columns remain. There wasn’t a lot to explore up there but the views were impressive. Here are some pictures.
We returned to the boat. Here are pictures of the boat from the dinghy.
We had lunch on the boat. After lunch Rick and Joanne consider the winds and identified a good place for us to go that would be protected. They decided that we should go to the town of Loutra on Kithnos.
We had great wind and we sailed most of the way. We got the boat up to 9 kts which is the hull speed of the boat. Here’s a picture of lighthouse along the way.
We pulled into a beautiful, calm harbor of Loutra.
It was a little tricky mooring—we dropped the anchor and then we had to lower the dinghy and use it to take a line from the back of our boat to the shore. The cruising guide said there would be rings that we could tie up to but the one we found was no longer attached to the ground so we ended up tying off to a rock.
Once we were situated we relaxed a little before going in to the town for dinner.
We had a nice dinner and then returned to the boat for dominoes. We had a very calm and restful sleep!