I woke up at 8:30, had breakfast and then went into town with Maurizio. We did our usual grocery run, but this time added a fresh tuna fish from a local fishmonger. I also finally found a post office, bought 5 prepaid envelopes and 5 separate stamps for postcards; I decided to embark on a postcard-writing marathon.
Once we left Euboea, we set sail to Andros and hit a pretty strong northern wind against us straight away. Maurizio cooked the fish for lunch simply: in olive oil and lemon--chefs worldwide note: it was totally delicious. We travelled through the Doro Channel (aka Kafierus Strait) for most of the afternoon. The Meltemi--the name of the wind in Aegean sea in the summer--continued to be strong and against us so we had to do a lot of tagging. This slowed us down and added to the journey, so we did not pass the NE cape of the island until after the sunset. We still had ways to go before we reached Kastron, the town on the eastern shore of the island where we wanted to spend the night.
The final journey down to the port was actually quite challenging, scary even. We navigated at night, like the night before, but this time the wind was much stronger and sea was rougher, which made the ride quite rocky. The boat swaying from side to side heavily. Maurizio let me steer regardless and went to the cabin to make dinner; he came up on the deck at one point and joked: "How can I make dinner if I am in a washing machine?" Soon we saw a very strong lighthouse ahead (according to the atlas, its light was powered to reach up to 25 miles, which is rare) showing us the way to the port and giving us hope of safe arrival (actually probably just me, the weather was probably just a walk in the park for a seasoned man of the sea like Maurizio).
Once we turned into the bay of Kastron, we finally had the waves coming in our direction rather than from the side, which stabilised the boat quite a bit. But it wasn't all plain vanilla just yet--the wind continued to be quite strong and so we took down the misen and later the main sail as well; the yankee (front sail) alone pushed us forward at a speed of 6 knots. Once we moored, I went straight to bed. I survived the naval washing machine, what can be worse?