Hydra Regatta 2024 - 51st Greek Revolutionary Race

The Hydra Regatta 2024 was a first for me in many ways. ⚓ It was my first race in this format, far from the north Aegean waters I know, and before we could race at all we had to get the boat there: a non-stop delivery from Kavala to Athens at the very end of winter.

This is the story of both: the long, cold delivery and the race that followed.

⛵ The delivery: Kavala to Athens

The race started in Athens, and Hakuna Matata, our Comet 41S, was in Kavala. So the adventure began with a delivery of about 40 hours of non-stop sailing south through the Aegean, with just one short stop of a couple of hours on Skyros.

It was proper upwind work almost all the way: strong wind on the nose, the boat slamming into the waves, hour after hour. Only when we rounded the corner towards Athens, at Cavo D'Oro, did we finally ease off.

This was cold winter sailing at the very end of astronomical winter. 🥶 I wasn't fully prepared for it. I had no proper sailing boots and no gloves, and on night watches the cold and spray got through everything. Lesson learned: winter offshore sailing needs winter gear.

Georgios Koulousis, Yorgo to all of us, and I were responsible for the boat. We split the time so that whenever one of us slept, the other was on deck. With 40 hours of upwind sailing, that rhythm was the only way to keep going.

👥 The crew

On the delivery I was the only Bulgarian, sailing with five Greeks. 🇧🇬🇬🇷 Our skipper, Dimitris Sofitsis, didn't join the delivery that year. He flew in for the race itself.

For the race the crew grew: three more sailors joined from Greece, and two more Bulgarians flew straight to Athens. After 40 hours with a small delivery crew, a full boat for the start felt like a luxury. My job for both races was the mainsail.

🧭 The race

The 51st Greek Revolution Race to Hydra, organised by the Hellenic Offshore Racing Club (HORC), ran from 23 to 25 March 2024. It had two offshore legs, from Faliro in Athens to Hydra and back, with a day off on the island in between. The Performance fleet had 32 boats, and we raced in division P2 with 8 boats, including our sister ship Aristofani, another Comet 41S.

The way out was a long one: we started at 11:00 and crossed the line at Hydra just after 10 p.m., 11 hours of racing. The way back took under 7 hours.

🌊 The challenges

• The delivery before the race. Most crews arrive fresh. We arrived after 40 hours of upwind sailing, and the race was still ahead of us.
• The cold. Late-winter temperatures, wind and spray, without the right boots and gloves. Staying warm and dry was a job in itself. 🥶
• Two-person watches. With Yorgo and me sharing responsibility for the boat, there was never a moment when nobody was on deck, and never much sleep.
• Unknown waters. Leaving the north Aegean for the Saronic Gulf meant new coastlines, new wind patterns and a new, bigger fleet.
• The wind. At this time of year the wind there is strong through the day, then drops away drastically in the evening. 💨 On the way to Hydra, as newcomers to these waters, we sailed straight into the wind shadow of the island. The breeze died and we lost hours crawling towards the marina, while boats that knew the area kept moving. With no wind, our ranking dropped sharply. It was a hard but valuable lesson in local knowledge. The race back was the opposite: strong wind all the way, and we did a broach by the book. 🌪️ The boat stopped dead, swung 90 degrees up into the wind and lay flat on the water. Many other boats went through the same, but it still cost us valuable time.

Our result: 6th of 8 in division P2 and 26th of 32 in the Performance fleet, improving from 7th to 5th in our division on the way back. The competition was fierce: many professional crews from around Athens, sailing their home waters and knowing every headland, wind shadow and local weather pattern. For a boat that had just sailed 40 hours from the north to get there, holding our own in that fleet was an achievement in itself. 💪

🏝️ Off the boat

With the full race crew on board, Hakuna Matata got crowded, so in Hydra I rented an apartment for myself. 🏠 After 40 hours of delivery and a full day of racing, a real bed and a quiet night on the island were exactly what I needed before the race back.

With the wind gone, most of the fleet finished late into the night, and around 1 a.m. Hydra came alive. 🌙 Hungry sailors flooded the restaurants and bars along the harbour. After more than 11 hours of racing we ate well, talked a lot, drank a lot, and every face around the tables was happy and smiling. 🍻

The day off showed me a completely different Greece, the Greece "down there". Hydra is a small, isolated, almost mythological island, where the harbour is the only gateway to the outside world. There are no roads for traffic, no cars, no vehicles of any kind: just paved and stone streets, people, cattle, horses, mules, cats and dogs. 🐴🐈 Walking through it felt surreal, like stepping out of time after days at sea. We spent the day exploring part of the island, including its old defensive positions, where rows of cannons still line the coastal walls. ☀️ The weather was perfect and warm, a world away from the cold we had suffered on the delivery.

🎬 Where the filming began

There is no video from this regatta. I was on the mainsail for both races, a full-time job with no free hands, and back then I didn't have proper camera equipment anyway. But watching the fleet, the light on the water and the broach on the way back, I kept thinking how much of it deserved to be filmed. That is where my sailing and regatta videos started. 🎥 What I do have from Hydra are photos, collected in the gallery below.

The Hydra Regatta started long before the start gun: in Kavala, on a cold night watch somewhere off Skyros, with my hands frozen on the sheets. It taught me as much about delivery sailing and preparation as about racing, and I'll never again go to sea in winter without proper boots and gloves. ⛵

Fair winds!

Race results: https://sas.orc.org/WEV.dll?action=index&eventid=onkll