Sir John Windlass

A quiet Sunday afternoon in Ayios Nikolaou, Kea. We are anchored just off the town and are in a café awaiting with excitement the arrival of our Turkish friend Dilek and her 21 year old son Deniz. She is planning, no, is going to be, the first Turkish woman to cross the Atlantic single handed and is doing it in her 9 metre boat Symina. The radio crackles to life. “Petronella, Petronella this is sailing yacht Symina”.  “Hi Dilek we are here and waiting for you.”

She lines herself up to reverse onto the harbour wall but the boat next to her has its anchor in her path and hers catches on it. Now she is stuck with a 52 foot boat on the end of her chain. No problem, happens all the time. Except that she has caught the boat of a Russian who comes out of the restaurant he was having lunch in looking considerably worse for wear, starts the engine and takes off. She is flung first one way than the other as he roars round in front of the horrified crowd on the harbour wall, hitting an anchored charter boat on one of his mad swings and nearly crushing Deniz between the two boats. 

Then he is gone but her brand new anchor winch has tripped and she can’t get her anchor up. John leaps into our dinghy and climbs onto her boat where he and Deniz haul the anchor up by hand. She motors into the anchorage, and John helps her to re-anchor. When I go across to say hello half an hour later she is still shaking.  Hugs and tears and a Greek beer later she has recovered and is laughing, though not at what happened. She is irrepressible and we are full of admiration for her and Deniz..

But the anchor trips each time she uses it and there is a smell of burning.  We travel with Symina and John helps her to pull up the anchor after each night and shows her how he uses our manual winch. She christens him Sir John Windlass in her lovely Turkish accent. He is very pleased!

Symina rafted up alongside Petronella