Intro

Greece is one of the best destinations to go yachting for those that are not too experienced and on a budget. It offers the best price quality ratio and the food is quite nice too.

Since i have a friend who is a captain, we tend to take a boat from a charter and sail there for a week, you can get especially good deals in the end of September and beginning of October since the season is ending by that time. You have to get a bit lucky with a weather which we actually did this year and temperature was always around 25 Celsius and we only got a few rainy days in the end.

There are some things you can only get in Greece.

Cost

It may seem counter intuitive but vacation on a yacht might be expensive, but on the contrary. Yacht rental per person a week sits in between 400-600 EUR that's about the same you'd pay for a hotel or Air B&B for seven days. Naturally you can get nuts and take a boat that would set you back 10k EUR or more per week, but it is not us.

But you can not compare the quality of your vacation surfing the waves and changing your location each day, docking in a pier in the evening, visiting restaurants in the islands that you can only reach by boat and sipping vine on a boat in a pier in the evening.

Docking in Greece is also cheap, sometimes ridiculously cheap. There has been a case when we have paid 1.18 EUR (One euro 18 cents) for the docking after a guy filled out all the paperwork that took him 15 minutes) lol In comparison it is not unusual to pay 100 EUR or more to dock in Croatia.

So you have your home with you at all time and your kitchen. You can choose to eat out all the time, but we love cooking and buy products in advance. There is a gas oven and refrigerator (to be completely honest mostly to keep your beers cold) and lunch on a boat while you are sailing is the best possible spice in the world.

Getting to.

It mostly depends where are you travelling from. But there are major marinas in all major islands like Lefkada, Kefalionia, Corfu to name a few.

Bigger marinas would host dozens of charters and hundreds if not thousands of boats for rent.

We traveled from Vilnius, Lithuania, and there is a direct flight to Corfu, so we sailed from there this time. You take a transfer from the airport (good idea to reserve in advance) to your charter and then you start on boarding the boat.

One of the most important things to do is to check in. You get on the boat, a representative from charter comes on board and you go through a list of all equipment and check in the boxes for all possible damages.

This is a very important step and a MUST DO as Greeks are renowned for charging for the damages you have not made.
A representative would usually tell you that he knows all the damages, repeatedly saying "no problem no problem" but when you will come back for a check in after your trip they would start pointing out various flaws that have been made by you. So make sure you check and mark every scratch take your time and complete this tedious process, it will save you a lot of money in the end. I know cases when people were charged 1500 EUR for damage they did not do. And your ability to negotiate is very limited since charter is taking about 2000 EUR deposit from your credit card for possible damages. It seems that it is a normal way for Greek charters to earn "extra" this way.

We know this, and it's been like that every time we rent a yacht and we could not avoid this ourselves in this last trip either and were charged 100 EUR for allegedly torn sale. But more about it in later posts.

Our boat. "Marina"

We got a good deal on this smaller and old yacht. I love small yachts personally since emotion is stronger on smaller ships, but they are not that fast. The smaller the boat the lover top speed usually is (many conditions here) but it feels faster, more agile and i love it. Of course there was a lot of damage done by previous "tenants"so I've made sure we marked as much of it as we could.

Check in complete and i am proud with myself lol

I can not stress enough but be extremely, EXTREMELY careful with these steps. They are steep, they get wet, they become slippery. Even though they are supposed to have adhesive anti slip ribbon attached to it, more often than not it is worn out and becomes a potential trap. Be VERY careful with these as you vacation might end with a fracture. I have seen quite a few very spectacular descents from these steps, and it's only a miracle guys did not break their bones.

Departure.

Usually we try to sail away from main marina on the first night, as it is overcrowded and noisy. But day is short and by the time you check in, buy all the provisions and have a sound meal on shore it's coming to an end. So we choose a location close enough and set sail for a short initial run. If possible buy provisions outside marina since it's overpriced. It is better to take a taxi, and you'd usually save about 20% of your bill.

Enjoying some local food and a beer while the rest of the crew is still acquiring all the provisions.

The first day is over and we get to enjoy one of many to come sunsets on this trip.

I have been extensively posting stories of this trip on Instagram, so if you'd like to see more videos follow me there BillMillTrill i would be more than glad to connect with fellow stemians and follow you back.