THE CORINTH CANAL
This is your Captain speaking. After spending a great afternoon and night tied alongside the town quay of Isidoros we started fairly early, that is for a couple of casual part time travellers, to head out to do the thirty odd nautical miles to the west entrance of the Corinth canal planning to anchor near there to go through the canal the next morning. We had a good sail for a lot of the way and had both sails up in 15 knot winds.
As we got closer to the town of Loutaki which is near the canal entrance we started looking for a suitable anchorage, it was around 4 o’clock in the afternoon so we had a bit of time to find an anchorage to shelter from the building winds.
We had the sails put away and were motoring past places with too deep anchor depths and not much protection from the winds. We finally resolved to anchoring on a lee shore, that is winds blowing us towards the beach at a place right next to the canal, but the water depth was good, about 6 meters deep and sand bottom. We put out a comfortable 60 meters of chain and prepared to spend a bouncy night with winds gusting to 20 knots and anchor alarm on.
The beach we were looking at was unassuming and not too pretty with stony looking shoreline, grey sand and small cliff face behind it so didn’t have too many beach goers on it.
Well…… upon closer inspection with the “only used for navigational aid” binoculars we discovered the beach had a different type of ”goers” on it.
Blokes, naked blokes. Only a few but sitting in pairs or by themselves. I thought, OK, it’s a nudist beach and the girls will show up eventually………... So, binoculars in hand I waited, then I noticed a couple of these beach bums had something in hand too and it wasn’t a fishing rod.
Then it got worse. Going ’down’ to the beach has a whole new meaning. Those blokes were waiting their turn to go up the canal.
Righto……. Not being part of the new age woke brigade I’ll call it what it is, a poof’s beach. They go there to sit on the hard rocks, I said rocks with an “r” to get ahead and get a job that’s probably what they told their wives anyway. A restless sleep that night, a rocking boat and concerned that if the anchor slipped, we would be on the beach and at the mercy of a gay salvage team, I don’t want these blokes helping with my mast and tackle.
The next morning, we woke tired and emotionally scarred to wait our turn to go ‘up’ the canal. The Corinth canal’ means something else to us now. Anyway, we lined up with only two other boats and got the radio call to let us through at about ten thirty that morning. Being only 25 meters wide at its narrowest point there is only one way at a time and only 6 meters deep the size boats going through is limited but surprisingly some quite large cargo ships do go through. It felt quite narrow for our Catamaran so had to concentrate on keeping it centred. The trip is pretty awesome with the bridges overhead and steep chasm like sides, it’s only 3 miles long and takes 40 odd minutes to traverse. There are constant earthworks along the sides as they have landslides blocking the canal off at times.
We had to pull up at the dock at the eastern end to go and pay for the transit. At 310 euros apparently it is the most expensive canal fee per distance in the world. But what the heck, we will probably only do it once for the experience, it was memorable for more reasons than one!
Maybe the Khyber Pass next time!
