Navigation

Hidden Anchorages of Lefkas Canal

June 2026·5 min read

Most charts treat the Lefkas Canal as a corridor — a narrow, dredged channel you motor through on the way somewhere else, with the swing bridge timing your patience and the depths reminding you to stay on the marked line. Treated that way, it's twenty minutes of concentration between two more interesting stretches of water. Treated properly, it's a destination in its own right, and one almost nobody stops in.

The canal separates Lefkada from the mainland for close to twenty kilometres, threading between low hills, fish farms, and reed beds that hum with cicadas in the heat of the afternoon. Depths are shallow and the bottom is soft mud, which sounds unpromising until you realise it means you can tuck the boat in close to the bank in places the chart plotter politely declines to recommend, drop the hook, and watch the light change over water so still it holds a second sky.

Where to actually stop

The stretch north of the town quay, before the canal narrows toward the bridge, has enough swinging room for a catamaran and just enough current to keep the anchor set without dragging. It's not glamorous — there's no taverna dock, no postcard view — but it's quiet in a way Nydri and Meganisi rarely manage in July. You hear birds. You hear your own halyards. After a day of flotilla traffic and ferry wake, that's worth more than scenery.

The canal doesn't ask to be admired. It just asks you to slow down, which most people on a week's charter have forgotten how to do.

Further south, closer to where the canal opens back into the gulf, a handful of small bays cut into the Lefkada shore give better holding and a short dinghy ride to a couple of unmarked tavernas that don't appear in any cruising guide we've seen — found, as most good places are, by ignoring the GPS and following the smell of grilled fish.

Practical notes

Time your transit around the swing bridge schedule, which the harbourmaster radio will confirm on request, and keep your speed down — the wake reaches the banks faster than you'd expect in a channel this narrow. None of this is technical sailing. It's the opposite: a chance to stop sailing for an evening and just sit somewhere unhurried, which is usually the part of a charter people remember longest.

Want to see the canal for yourself? It's one of the quieter stops on our 7-day Ionian route.

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Life Aboard

What a Week on a Catamaran Really Feels Like

May 2026·6 min read

Before their first charter, most guests arrive with one of two expectations. Either they picture something close to a floating hotel suite — air conditioning, smooth water, room service with a view — or they brace for something closer to camping with extra danger, all damp bunks and seasickness. Neither is quite right, and the gap between expectation and reality is, more often than not, what people end up loving most.

A Lagoon 400 is wide, stable, and forgiving in a way that surprises people who've only sailed — or imagined sailing — on a monohull. The twin hulls mean less heel, more deck space, and a saloon that stays level enough to put a glass down without thinking twice. It is not, however, a hotel. The water comes from tanks. The power comes from batteries topped up by the engines and, when the sun's out, solar. None of it is unlimited, and that's the first lesson everyone learns, usually around day three: small, repeated awareness — of water use, of battery levels, of what's left in the fridge — quietly takes over from the constant convenience of life on land.

The rhythm of the days

Mornings start early, not because anyone makes you, but because the light over the water at six is better than coffee, and there's a particular kind of restlessness that comes from sleeping with the hatches cracked to the sea air. The skipper plots the day's leg over breakfast; by mid-morning you're underway, sails up if the wind cooperates, motoring if it doesn't, island-hopping at a pace that feels unhurried even when you're covering real distance.

Nobody asks "are we there yet" on a sailing boat, because the getting-there is the part everyone actually wants.

Afternoons are for swimming off the back of the boat in water too clear to photograph honestly, for napping in the cockpit shade, for the slow argument about which bay looks better for the night's anchorage. Evenings are dinner cooked aboard or ashore at a quayside taverna, depending on the mood and the wind, followed by a sky with more stars in it than most guests have seen in years.

What people don't expect

The thing that catches almost everyone off guard isn't the boat — it's how quickly a small group of strangers or a stretched-thin family becomes a functioning crew. Someone ends up good at knots. Someone claims the dinghy-driving job and won't give it up. By day four, the cabin you were nervous about sharing space in for a week feels like the only place that makes sense, and going home, oddly, is the part that takes adjusting to.

Curious what a week aboard Simone actually looks like, cabin by cabin?

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Destination

Meganisi to Skorpios: the Perfect Day Sail

August 2025·4 min read

Some legs of a charter are about distance. This one is about exactly the opposite — a crossing short enough to do almost on a whim, between an island most guests have never heard of and one whose name everyone half-recognises without quite knowing why.

Meganisi sits just southeast of Lefkada's coast, close enough that the channel between them barely counts as open water on a calm day. It's a small, quiet island of goat paths and a handful of villages, the kind of place where the harbour at Vathy has exactly enough tavernas and no more. Leaving its bays in the morning, the wind — when there is any — tends to come from the northwest, giving a clean reach across toward Skorpios that rarely takes more than an hour.

The island everyone's heard of

Skorpios is privately owned and has been since the 1960s, when Aristotle Onassis bought the whole island and turned it into the kind of retreat that tabloids never quite stopped writing about. You can't land — it remains private property — but anchoring just off its shore, in the lee of pine-covered slopes that come right down to the water, gives a sense of the place that no amount of reading about it really does.

You don't go to Skorpios to land on it. You go to sit in its shadow for an afternoon and let the history do the work.

The water in the small bay on its western side is calm enough on most days for a long, lazy swim, the kind where you tread water and look back at the boat and the pine trees and don't feel any particular urge to be anywhere else. Lunch on board — usually whatever the morning's catch or market run turned up — tends to stretch out here longer than planned.

Getting back

The return leg in the afternoon often picks up a bit more breeze as the thermal effect builds over the mainland, making for a livelier sail back than the gentle morning crossing out. It's a short day by sailing standards — a few hours of actual sailing bookending a long, unhurried stop — and that's exactly the point. Not every day on the water needs to be about miles covered.

This crossing is a regular stop on our Ionian route, weather and itinerary permitting.

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