Out of Skiros

On Friday morning we checked the forecast carefully and found out that we have a good window where we can sail back North toward the Sporades. We didn’t know if we would hit Skantzoura or Skopelos but whichever would be good for us as it would be out of the range of the 6-7Bft.
So we left Skiros at 10am. Once past cape Oro we got a steady wind of about 18-20 knots, 60 degrees off our bow. We had two reefs on the main and we were running at 7.5 knots.
We had a beautiful sail (only a little bumpy) till we got close to Alonissos. There we learned the true meaning of a new term: “Borino”. Borino, is some kind of an air turbulence or something like that.
As we got closer to Alonissos, the wind dropped significantly and we kept seeing massive clouds over Alonissos. Yael asked me what they meant, but I had no idea. Fortunately (and thanks to Yael) we still had two reefs on the main (but full blown jib) as we got under the clouds.
Then suddenly, the wind picked up to gusts of up to 25 knots straight on our nose (Borino, I guess).
We quickly furled the jib to the smallest napkin we could get, and sailed close hauled towards Skopelos. The problem was that we couldn’t go close enough and according to my calculation we would have ended up 7 miles south of Skopelos.
After some debate, we decided to keep going and hope that the wind would drop. And this is what happened! When we got to the south most tip of Skopelos, the winds from both sides of the Island merged and the result was almost no wind. This was a good opportunity to take off all the sails and just motor into Panormos bay on Skopelos.
On Friday morning we checked the forecast carefully and found out that we have a good window where we can sail back North toward the Sporades. We didn’t know if we would hit Skantzoura or Skopelos but whichever would be good for us as it would be out of the range of the 6-7Bft.
So we left Skiros at 10am. Once past cape Oro we got a steady wind of about 18-20 knots, 60 degrees off our bow. We had two reefs on the main and we were running at 7.5 knots.
We had a beautiful sail (only a little bumpy) till we got close to Alonissos. There we learned the true meaning of a new term: “Borino”. Borino, is some kind of an air turbulence or something like that.
As we got closer to Alonissos, the wind dropped significantly and we kept seeing massive clouds over Alonissos. Yael asked me what they meant, but I had no idea. Fortunately (and thanks to Yael) we still had two reefs on the main (but full blown jib) as we got under the clouds.
Then suddenly, the wind picked up to gusts of up to 25 knots straight on our nose (Borino, I guess).
We quickly furled the jib to the smallest napkin we could get, and sailed close hauled towards Skopelos. The problem was that we couldn’t go close enough and according to my calculation we would have ended up 7 miles south of Skopelos.
After some debate, we decided to keep going and hope that the wind would drop. And this is what happened! When we got to the south most tip of Skopelos, the winds from both sides of the Island merged and the result was almost no wind. This was a good opportunity to take off all the sails and just motor into Panormos bay on Skopelos.