As I write this, I’m sitting in the comfortable saloon of Celestine, my Carambola 38, an aluminium, centreboard masthead sloop. We’re in the tiny fishing harbour of Kalanto, at the southern tip of the Greek island of Naxos. We are sheltering from the rotating storm Daniel, a ‘medicane’ in the Ionian Sea, sending 45-knot Meltemi winds down through the Greek Islands. Some areas of Greece which had just survived raging bush fires, then experienced 730mm of rain in 24 hours, causing recordbreaking flooding of ‘biblical proportions’ and 17 deaths.
I’d been so focused on finding the perfect harbour to ride out the storm, I’d failed to notice it was just a fishing harbour – no shops, no buses, nothing, apart from the tinkle of goats’ bells in the sun-scorched hills.
An inventory of our supplies revealed some stale bread and cheese and not much else. My crew, Mark Beckerleg, looked like
