In September 2020 we were anchored off the south-east of Antipaxos: two yachts, two skippers, and eighteen people between us. Most of them had never set foot on a boat before that week.
Sixty miles to the south, Ianos was turning into the thing the forecasters had been warning about for days. It came ashore on Lefkada on the Friday morning and went on to do real damage on Kefalonia, Ithaca and Zakynthos. We were on its northern edge, and nobody was suggesting we would see the worst of it. The number on my screen for two in the morning was twenty-five knots. We had fifteen at the time.
Twenty-five knots is not a crisis. That was never what the argument was about.
The argument
I wanted to move to Gaios. It is the most sheltered harbour in the Ionian, it was a short hop away, and we had hours of daylight left. You go in, you tie up, you eat, you sleep, and whatever arrives in the night arrives while you are already where you want to be.
The other skipper wanted to stay. His case was not a stupid one, and I want to put it properly rather than knock it down. The anchorage was comfortable. The guests were settled and swimming. Dinner was under way. Twenty-five knots with good holding is not much of a night. And moving two boats and eighteen inexperienced people for a forecast that might soften costs you a whole evening for, quite possibly, nothing.
My case was simpler and it is not really about weather at all. I hate last-minute, unplanned decisions when the forecast is certain. The cost of moving early is an evening. The cost of moving late is a night move, in the dark, with tired people who do not know the boat, at the exact moment conditions are getting worse rather than better. Those two things are not the same size, and the forecast was not ambiguous.
We stayed. His boat lay on the inner side of the bay. I anchored further out.
Two in the morning
The sea arrived before the wind did. That is the part worth remembering, and it is the part people new to this do not expect: you can be sitting in fifteen knots and still have a bay turn unusable, because what reaches you first is swell generated somewhere else entirely. Sixty miles away, something large was pushing water north.
The other boat, further in, moved first. They weighed and left.
And that decided it for me, because we sail in company. Staying put alone in a bay that the other boat has just judged untenable is not a position any skipper wants to defend afterwards, whatever the anchor is doing. So I lifted too, twenty minutes behind them.
At two in the morning, in the dark, with people aboard who had been asleep a quarter of an hour earlier and had never done a night passage of any length, we motored to Gaios. Which is where I had argued we should be since the previous afternoon.
What I take from it
The lesson is not that I was right. I was, as it happens, but that is the least useful thing in this story and I would not have written it down if that were the point.
The decision you are making is usually when, not whether. We both knew we might end up in Gaios. The disagreement was only about what time we would admit it. Staying put did not avoid the move; it just relocated it to the worst hour of the night and added darkness and tiredness to it. When the forecast is certain, the question stops being “will we need to move?” and becomes “do we want to do this at six in the evening or at two in the morning?”
When you sail in company, you do not decide alone. I could argue my case, I could be overruled, and then I could be moved anyway by the other boat’s decision at an hour not of my choosing. That is the trade you make for sailing together, and it is worth understanding before the forecast gets interesting rather than during it.
Inexperienced crew change the arithmetic. With a practised crew, a night move is an inconvenience. With eighteen people on their first week afloat, it is a different undertaking entirely — and that weight belongs in the decision you take at five in the afternoon, not the one you take at two in the morning.
Nobody was hurt and nothing was damaged. We got it wrong in the cheapest way it is possible to get it wrong, which is the only reason it is a story and not a report.
Ianos made landfall on Lefkada on the morning of 18 September 2020 with sustained winds around 100 km/h, and caused severe flooding on Kefalonia, Ithaca and Zakynthos. Reporting from the time.