The last day of the holiday. As part of the course, the instructor had asked us to prepare a trip around the whole of Poros island.
Poros island isn't huge, and getting around all of it isn't an enormous undertaking - but it is far enough to make a lot of people nervous about the journey. It's about 25km.
Joke explanation: "Vitsi" is Finnish for "Joke", which is what some of our co-kayakers thought of the suggestion of going round the entire island.
A quick note on the speed at which Sea Kayaks travel at: a good speed for a Sea Kayak to go is often reckoned to be about 3km/h. That gives us an 8 hour journey. We made it round in 7 hours, and that included over an hour of breaks, and another stop to practice/demonstrate towing technique. So we probably did it in about 5:30, travelling at over 4.5 km/h for the journey. How did we get to go so fast? Because it is actually quite hard to predict how fast a Sea Kayak will travel at - the effect of wind and currents can be pretty huge. But we made it round in good time, and weren't particularly tired at the end of it.
The journey was mostly uneventful and I enjoyed it. There wasn't much of note on the journey - we paddled, watched the scenery and enjoyed the warmth (about 30°C). We stopped for lunch right on the very northern-most tip of Poros. There isn't much to stop on there, a rocky ledge of 5 x 5 meters.
Even on a tiny, crappy little ledge, there was still a water taxi if we needed it.
Some 2 or 3 hours later - I totally lost track of the time - we got to the south side of Poros again. It was a warm bank-holiday Saturday and there were a LOT of larger boats in Russian Bay so we had to be a bit careful, but nobody got crushed so it was alright.
How can Greece be broke when her seas are filled with yachts like this?
So, mostly it was a really calm trip around the island. The winds were from the east, so we couldn't feel them on the south-west of the island. To get back to the hotel in Askeli we had to cut through this thin channel into the water of south-east Poros:
The only channel on Poros
Some wave lore: a long fetch - that is, a stretch of water that is uninterupted by anything - allows the wind to come across it and build up some pretty big waves. Heading direct east from the channel there is pretty much nothing, so a plenty long reach. Another factor in wave form is the water depth - as the water gets shallow, the waves get steeper. This all hit us when we got through the channel, and our very last 20 minutes of kayaking were spent joyfully cruising over metre high, steep-sided waves, and we came splashing down on the other side. Exciting seas. The beach where we landed was sheltered from the winds, so as we approached the waters were flat, and there were people swimming in the waters. Looking back to where we had just come from, the waters looked so peaceful, you could barely make out the white-capped adventures.
One of the kayakers perhaps wasn't as fit as the others and had had quite a hard time with the resuces and the long journeys and the high waters - GF and I celebrated it all being over with him, and then we packed up the boats and we took them home.
