The Salt of Salzburg

We took the 2-hour train ride to a place where the hills are actually alive with the sound of music. Yes, this is where the Sound of Music was filmed. The famous Von Trapp family lived not far from the center of town. As you stroll around you can still pick out many of the backdrops for scenes immortally captured on film. For some strange reason I couldn’t get “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria” out of my head all day.

Salzburg is a city that is more the size of a large hamlet than a town. It is nestled where the Alps thrust up along with church spires from the verdant landscape at the border between Germany and Austria. Towering over this town is a huge white castle that is white as salt. Its importance is in the strategic controlling of salt during the Middle Ages. And this fortress is where the name of the town comes from Saltz (salt) Burg (fortress). It was built by the Catholic Church around 1077 as a fortress to protect both the town people and the precious salt that is mined near by. If you had salt in those days you had something that could preserve food. Salt was valuable enough to require a fortress that was so fortified that this fortress was never breached. Many tried but none were successful. For decades this secure fortress was added on to and expanded until it not only covered the mountaintop, it also draped down the extremely steep cliffs. With walls over 100 feet high, the fortress would last for centuries until it was voluntarily handed to Napoleon in the 1800’s.

In the evening we head back to Munich hitching a ride from Roberts friend, Roland who teaches music in Salzburg and spends his weekends in Munich. We stop on the way home to a huge lake resort. The weather is brisk with occasional rain showers. But that doesn’t dissuade us from walking along the lakeshore. As twilight sets in, we head for a restaurant on the waters edge for some traditional German dishes before heading back to Munich. The weather went from rain showers to rain, so we spent the next day visiting museums and trying to stay dry. I was excited to see a special exhibit of Vermeer paintings. But as it turns out there was only one Vermeer painting. The rest of exhibit were various painting collected in the 1800’s by Bavarian kings. Still a nice exhibit despite the let down of seeing just one Vermeer.

The Magic of Munich

Usually when we fly back and forth from Europe we go through London. This time we decided to visit our friend Robert in Munich. It was the first time I stayed in Munich longer than a connection flight at the airport. This Bavarian gem dazzles you with copper domed churches, grand stone architecture and city halls that have cuckoo clocks that are 4 stories high. Every 15 minutes the doors open and German florlines are chased by young dashing German mechanical boys. Motion on the street stops as people gaze at the huge display that would fit right in at Disneyland’s Small World ride. It is all ceremonial and wonderful.

Robert has three bikes so we spent the first day peddling around the city, visiting vast parks that were once international flower festivals and rivers where even in late March sun worshipers were prepping their tans for summer. Across the bridge and further up the river we stopped to see a bunch of surfers surfing the narrow river. Yeah you read that right. They surf in Munich. There is a section of the river that steadily flows under the bridge and as it comes out it crests into a constant wave. City signs forbid swimming because of the current. But surfing has become an acclaimed event that regularly happens and the cautions are ignored. We continued on to even bigger city parks, in fact the biggest park found in any city in the world is in Munich. There are open squares where kings once lived and circled plazas where people hang out in the afternoon sun. The architecture is beautiful old world built at a time when buildings were built of stone to last the centuries, not the decades. It is a very livable city that anyone would find charming and enchanting.

Winter in San Francisco

After getting the boat repairs started and winterizing everything we left Turkey and headed back to San Francisco for the winter. We arrived right before Thanksgiving. It is nice to be home but the weather has already turned cool. We already miss the lingering warmth of Southern Turkey. We spent the holidays with family and friends and filled our time with winter projects and renewing friendships. Time seemed to fly by and on March 23rd we found ourselves once again, crammed aboard British Airways, heading back to the Mediterranean.

Things That Go Bump in the Day

We have a favorite port just as you round the tip about half way down the coast of Turkey. It is the old Roman harbor of Kindos. We have stayed there several times before. The afternoon winds were so strong, we once again took shelter. While we were hunkering down against the strong winds, other sailboats eased in as well. One sailboat was not so lucky. With the strong winds, their anchor did not hold and they found themselves shoved up against the rocks, pinned down by the gusty winds. We jumped in our dingy to help them out. Another dingy from one of the other sailboats joined us. The husband was standing on one of the rocks desperately trying to push the boat away from the damaging rocks. I could tell that his wife was pretty clueless about what to do. We tied our two dinghies to the boat and tried to pull it off the rocks. But the wind was no match for the two small outboard motors. It was going to take something bigger. I jumped aboard to help the bewildered woman. One of the other sailboats came over and I tied a long line to the boat and told the woman to feed the line through the bracket designed to hold the rope while I went up front to use the anchor to pull the bow of the boat away. I guess the woman did not understand the significants of how important it was for the line to stay in the bracket, because when the sailboat started pulling on the line that by now had slipped out of the bracket, it pulled off ever single stanyon on that side of the boat. We did manage to get the boat off the rocks and in a safe place for the night.

The next morning we motored out of the harbor under much more favorable winds. When we were a safe distance from the harbor and shore we raised our mainsail. Just as we were turning into the wind, the boat came to a jarring stop. We hit a rock in what was suppose to be 60 feet of water. Yikes. One of the hulls was cracked all the way through and a small amount of water was coming into the bulge. The automatic pump kicked in and managed to keep the water pumped out of the boat. But with that damage, we were forced to head to Marmaris Turkey, which was about 7 hours away, and have the boat hauled out for repairs. Fortunately this is one of the best-equipped marinas in the Mediterranean. Over the next couple of weeks we got estimates, talked to the insurance company and arranged for repair work to be done. Our navigation system electronically tracks exactly where the boat goes. When the insurance appraiser came on to the boat, we showed him the navigation records along with the pilot book that normally has those kinds of obstacles carefully plotted. Evidently we were privileged to be the first ones to discover a previously uncharted rock just below the waterline. Great huh. I wonder if they will let us name the rock?

Looking for Warmer Weather

As August bleeds into September, the weather in the Ionians cools dramatically. We originally planned to sail north to Croatia. With the cooling weather, we decided instead to head south to Southern Turkey. We figured that we could sail for a couple of months more in that area where summer lingers longer into fall. So off to Turkey we head, through the Corinthian Channel and back to the Aegean Sea.

Lovely Levkas

I have been to Levkas 3 times before. We started on the east side and then spent a couple of nights on the southwestern tip of the island in the deep bay of Vasiliki. This bay is one of the top 10 windsurf spots in Europe. And no wonder; at around 2 in the afternoon, the winds go from mild to torrent in a matter of minutes. You could watch the water turn from still to whitecaps as the wind progressed across the bay. As the wind picked up, so did the windsurfers until there were literally over 100 colorful sails cutting through the water at speeds that would make a powerboat jealous. It looked from a distance like a pack of sharks with colorful painted fins frantically zipping back and forth, looking for prey. Just as quickly as the wind had come up, a couple hours later it dissolved into the sea and the windsurfers dissolved onto shore for a night of bragging and vibratos.

My favorite part of the island is the west coast. The beaches are some of the most spectacular in all of Europe. The terrain is steep and plunges just as deep into the blue sea. The cliffs look like they were sliced off with a knife covered in orange marmalade. Many of the beaches are only accessible by boat. So even during August, there are a lot of deserted beaches. We anchored out for a night in one such beach. There was no protection from the wind and sea, but the weather was calm and the holding good. We hung out most of the day until the early afternoons picked up. When they were strong enough, we raise our sails and pointed the boat to Pervezia, a nice sized town tucked safely in a deep bay, on the mainland of Greece.

Magnificent Meganisi

This Rorschach blot shaped island has more inlets and jagged coast line than any other of the Ionians. The top is especially well suited for deep anchorages. But the bays are deep and you need a lot of anchor chain to stay in the middle. So the boats are mostly anchored near the shore with a tie line to shore to keep them from swinging. We however did find a shallow enough spot right in the middle to spend the night. It is a big bay and when the night covered the bay, the stars blossomed in the sky. And all around us was a circle of mooring lights on the top of the masts of the other sailboats encircling us like a lite up lasso with us in the center. The water was like glass and little breeze all night. You could not help but jump into the inviting waters of this majestic bay.