And not just from me. No, Louise wasn’t finished either. As we pulled into our sweet spot, just one boat off of land (and therefore an easy hop and skip onto land – or so we thought), we sandwiched ourselves in between two Spanish boats. As we were sorting out lines and tying ourselves up, we noticed a smaller yacht, not affiliated with Yacht Week, pulling up behind us attempting to board our ship. Realizing quickly that they were attempting to cut the line and tie up next to us perked up the ears of our tiny little Swedish bitch. “We will not take your line, go away!” she is screaming over and over again as the boat appears to ignore her and throw it’s ropes up onto our boat nearly knocking her in the face.

But Louise was not alone in her rage today, and our Spanish neighbors were not about to allow this random dude to take advantage of her seemingly petite stature. Suddenly, a big fat Spaniard from the boat next to us grabs a giant megaphone and start stomping his way to the front of the boat screaming as many profanities I have ever heard strewn together in Spanish. As those of us who could understand nearly fell over at the site of Dumbo charging at this stray boat with his megaphone, the whole group of Yacht Weekers erupted in a din of vulgar phrases and racial slurs in every language imagineable just screaming at this boat to go away. And in a single moment of Yacht Week unity, we all managed to push the foreigner away and cheer loudly long-distance toasting shot glasses of tequila.

After we finally tied on, we tackled the task of getting on shore, which proved to be more difficult as the larger yacht we had tied up to, was too large for our plank to reach from our deck to theirs without promising serious drunken injury later. So instead, we began our climb across 4 or 5 boats to get up to shore. Not such a good parking spot after all.

Once on shore, we walked as a group to get lunch, finding a cute spot on the other side of the port with a table large enough for all 16 of us and with a menu to satisfy everyone. I, naturally, being completely sick of greek salad, opted for the most non-greek thing I could find on the menu: a nutella and banana crepe with chocolate ice cream and chocolate syrup on top. Utterly excellente.

After lunch, a group of us decided we would be adventurous and actually do something besides drink on the boat, so we decided we would go  walk around town. Naturally needing some sort of catlyst to permit daytime drinking, we filled our 2 liter Coke bottle filled with bootleg gypsy juice and started trying to think of a good mobile drinking game to play. What we found, were Cats.

There are cats EVERYWHERE in Greece, but moreso on Hydra than anywhere else I went. So being that we wanted to get drunk pretty quickly, Alissa and I came up with the game. Everytime you saw a cat, you had to yell “Cat! MEOW” and then the other person had to drink. It sounded simple and harmless enough, but after we finished the first bottle in about 30 minutes, we knew we were screwed.

We spent a bit of time buying white statues of weird Greek god’s with giant penises souvenir shopping and then decided it was time for a bit of a sobering break before dinner and we headed to a great cove known for it’s swimming, cliff diving and clear water. We met up with most of the other Yacht Weekers there and spent a couple hours lazing about and jumping off of rocks. The only real strange part of it all, was that when you wanted to get out of the water, after you dived in, you had to wait for a wave to slam you up against a rock face and reach up and grab for the ladders hanging down sporadically so you could hoist yourself up and climb back up on the cliff. Fair enough. Except when you missed and the same wave that slammed you up against the wall, scraped you down it’s side and across the rock reef lying underneath it. Way fun.

We had fancy dinner reservations set up at a great restaurant called Sunset, right on the cliffs. It was beautiful. Unfortunately, we never got to try the food because the place was obviously not used to big parties and had no idea how to handle us and after waiting for LITERALLY an hour and a half for our first order of drinks (other than the water on the table) and appetizers, and having stuffed our faces with enough bread to sink a ship, we threw in the towel, and left, not even getting a chance to scream at our waiter about how awful the service was because… well… he never came back. Turns out, his shift was up and he just left, and no one got reassigned to us. Awesome.

The nightclub scene on Hydra is fantastic. And after finding a nice gyro spot back near the boat and sitting on the seawall eating $5 gyros, 40s of Mythos and some iced coffee, we headed to a great bar called the Pirate Bar which I highly recommend if anyone goes to Hydra. It had an excellent non-yacht-week crowd, fantastic music and glow in the dark vodka. Not to mention hot bartenders and plenty of barstools, a big plus in my book.

We left the Pirate Bar at about 2 to head to the Yacht Week organized event which was a rented out all white party room on the cliffs with a huge balcony overlooking a giant illuminated volcanic rock reef. It was intimate, private, had excellent tunes spinning and we had a bit of a rager. Most of the boys had dressed up in togas (being that we were the only crew that didn’t come with matching outfits, we had to do something) and we danced and danced and danced and drank and talked. We had a great drunken session outside about the “old Jenks Southeast days” which was the elementary school that some of us went to. Yup. Miss Hafner would be proud.

We finished the night with another couple hours at Pirate Bar where we closed it down just in time to run back to the Gyro place and have another round of late night on the sea wall overlooking the illuminated black rock and the gorgeous rising Greek sun.

Yacht Week.

Unfortunately, for the first time on this trip, we had a hungover skipper. Louise finally gave into Yacht week and spent her wee morning hours drinking bourbon from the bottle with a couple of friends on our deck. Our 9 AM start time was just a little late, and although we were the first to awaken of our line of boats, we knew we were still probably a bit late. In addition, we had acquired a stowaway.

One of Mitch’s conquests, the nicest and seemingly most normal of the hot naked San Diego crew, crawled above deck as Louise and I began cleaning. She tossed her dress from the night before, and dived into the water to swim back to her own boat, attached to the second row of boats about 50 yards away. About 15 minutes later, she came swimming back. Her boat, had left her. And she was stranded with no way to get to Hydra except with us.

So off we went. With only a 30 minute sail to Hydra, she seemed less stressed and knew she’d be reunited with her friends soon. Unfortunately, the line to get into port was about 2 hours long. And in addition to our 40 or so yachts lining up to get in, there were large… no gigantic… ferries pulling in and out about every 20 minutes. We were kindly reminded by the coast guard to get the hell out of the way if any of these giant 300 passenger ships came pulling in, but we needed no convincing. They would come careening from across the Med at a speed that would put a cigarette boat to shame and would sliding stop into their 20 ft long parking spot along a sheer cliff inside the tiny football sized port.

Now, as we sit, float, and wait in the choppy waters, which wasn’t as easy as just parking and putting on your flashers but required a constant watchful eye from Louise as we maintained our position in line and avoided crashing into one of the other million dollar yachts floating in the swell. At one point, one of the Yacht week boats, having waited long enough about 4 spots behind us, decided he would ignore the boats all lining up and check out what was going on in front. In typical rush hour traffic ass hole style, he creeps past 4 or 5 boats who look appallingly at him but do nothing to stop him. But Louise was not to be played for a fool, and being slightly hungover had brought out the Swedish bitch in our pint sized skipper.

And the tiny blonde yells the words that will live in skipper history in a voice that could have easily come out of some burly alchoholic/smoker 50 year old fisherman’s mouth.

“We’re all queuing mother fucker! Go back where you came from!”

Instantly, our boat erupts in laughter and we all reach for any recording devices to attempt to catch any other screaming hilarities that have yet to leave her sweet little mouth.

As the scared macho skipper from the other boat retreats, Louise received a booming applause from any boat in a 100 ft. radius and we grab the little girl a beer for her efforts.

There ain’t no skipper like our skipper.

We love you Louise.

We used to have this cove on our lake, Grand Lake, called Dripping Springs. It was a long skinny cove, about a mile long, and on any given weekend in the summertime, you could pull in here to find at least 30 boats tied up together ready for a day of laying out, drinking, pumping out loud rap music and jumping off cliffs. On holiday weekends, especially the Fourth of July, the Drip became daytime resting spot for several hundred boats, tied up to one another. A huge floating night club, operating during the day.

So it wasn’t quite that, but same concept. Today we were sailing back to Sex Island, AKA Dokos (Δοκός). There is no town on Dokos, no port, no marina. We were going to find a cove, park our boats and party.

Today was a fantastic sailing day. We were finally getting the hang of it, tacking back and forth to help optimize our speed. At one point, we got a bit too cocky tho. We needed to pull the main sail up a bit higher if we REALLY wanted to go as fast as we could. It was only about a  6 inch adjustment, but we were up for the challenge. We found the right rope, wrapped it around the wench and released the lock only to realize that the angle was bad and the way that the rope was on the wench, when the lock was released and the pressure of the 30 mph wind on the sail had wrenched the rope into a knot around the wench. It was all hands on deck at this point, with several people assigned to rope holding, wenching and me on the steering, while Louise tried to figure how the frack we were going to get this unstuck. She called in a mayday to Phillip and we spent the next 20 or so minutes trying everything.

Finally, we got it. Without Phillip’s help. And we realized we had just passed our first test. Something went wrong, and we fixed it.

Sailors.

We arrived in Dokos full of pride, one of the first 5 boats and tied up to the cliffs. I began preparation of the big Gypsy feast to be had on the boat that night. I was cooking bangers and mash with lentils and macaroni and cheese. It was literally all we could find in the tiny corner store before we left Plaka and was going to require that I make macaroni and cheese from scratch without a recipe, come up with some recipe for lentils and make instant mashed potatoes with instructions in Greek (honestly have never made instant potatoes before).

The party on the boats began just after dinner as the sun started to set. We started ours off with a couple games of Asshole playing with whatever we could find at this point as we’d almost run out of beer. A dance party was moved over to the Sweaty Swea (coz that’s where all things sweaty happen). At this point, Jon came back from a little swimming excursion to try and find our dinghy engine and informed us all that there’s something weird going on in the water. Apparently we were at the site for this certain type of bioluminescent algae called Noctiluca scintillans. Basically, it’s this microorganism that lives in shallow coastal waters in certain places that lights up when you disturb it in any way. That could be driving a boat through it, swimming in it or simply reaching into the water and moving your hand through it.

Naturally, for the next 5 hours, in between the shots and the beer bongs, we swam and swam taking turns with the snorkeling mask so you could watch the algae from underwater.

Literally, one of the coolest things I have ever seen in my life.

Well, that’s the story at least. Iggy and Mitch were out late driving around in circles with some boobies and the next thing we know it’s the morning and our dinghy has no engine.

We’re blaming it on a boat of dirty Spaniards who hate us. They have this amazingly awesome black wood deck boat and they think they are better than us. Regardless of the fact that they might be, we instantly hate them. And the rumor on the sea (see how I did that? Rumor on the streets, rumor on the sea.. HA) is that it was the dirty Spaniards with their evil black boat.

In addition, our dinghy is also flat. That is likely the fault of Iggy and Mitch, but not a huge issue as we have a repair kit and it was relatively unavoidable with the amount of ropes, anchors and crap sticking in every direction the night before.

We make plans to meet up with Phillip and the Spaniards we actually like in a small bay for the day since the actual sail to Plaka (Πλάκα) is pretty quick today. Because all of the Swedish skippers seem to be on the same wavelength, somehow we ended up with 7 boats in the bay hanging out, swimming and drinking. It was a good group of Americans, Spanish, Brits, Swedes and French and we had a great time. There was some snorkeling nearby and some good cliffs for diving. There was a gorgeous beach where people started to show up and, I’m sure, marvel at our amazing yachts and be so jealous that they weren’t out on the water.

Then these two giant super yachts showed up with their own staffs and dinghies bigger than our boats. They both had jet skies where one of the skippers would jump off to go help tie the things to the cliffs to keep them from drifting back out to sea. It looked like they could have pulled the rocks off the cliff and dragged it to the next island.

After we’d had our fill, we decided to leave first to attempt to get a good spot in Plaka (back on the mainland). Even tho we arrived relatively early, we still were way later than most of the other people and we got a shite spot second to last on the second row. What that meant is that we had to climb over about 8 boats to get to the shore. Fine at 5 PM, not so fine at 5 AM.

We had about 4 hours before dinner so we decided to do a little exploring. We walked over to town, got some groceries, hung out on a man-made beach and got a snack at a local restaurant.

The waiter at this restaurant was fracking hilarious. He spoke a little English, but he thought that the proper response to any question involved a combination of the words “sorry”, “please”, and “thank you”. “Do you have stuffed grape leaves?” “Please, please, yes, of course, thank you.” “Excuse me, can I please get another beer?” “Sorry, please, thank you, yes, please, yes.” He was so excited all the time to serve us, to show us where the bathroom was, to get us more bread. Then you would see him run downstairs and yell at his daughter who was setting up tables outside but who obviously wasn’t doing it right (he screams as he hits her on the side of the head for not being perfect enough). We loved this guy.

TYW had set up a dinner for us that was one long table where all 250 or so of us sat. It was right on the pier overlooking the bay, all of our boats and the little pebble beach. We had our normal Greek meal options but in addition, they served this amazing cheesy dip that tasted EXACTLY like this dip called heroine dip that one of my best friends in high school’s mom used to make for us. It was sooooo yummy! In addition, this restaurant made it way too easy to steal wine as they put a 2 liter plastic water bottle full of it about every 4 people. So we stole and then proceeded to go back and make our first round of Gypsy juice on the sea wall overlooking all of our boats.

The club we had set up for that night was pretty awesome. It was a three story night club (why on earth this really cool clubs exist in these towns with populations of less than 1000, I don’t know, but they do). This club was obviously built into the side of this cliff and had glass floors in several places which showed the rock cliffs underneath as well as in several places you could look down at the people dancing in the level below you.

Because we obviously hadn’t had enough of it yet, we spent most of this night jumping around dancing to the normal American mix Euro-pop rap scene the DJ mixed up. For respite, there was a really cool open air terrace at the top of this club where you could go up for air, a bit of a cool down and a bit quicker access to the bar.

Our engine broke.

I have no idea what actually happened. I think we were leaking oil. Or something. But not at an alarmingly fast rate. So we were required to either sail, or use our engine but to go no faster than 4 knots. Today. It took us a freaking long time to go where we were going. But we left early, so it wasn’t so bad. We also got to sail in and around several Greek islands which made for a bit of a change in scenery.

And we kind of got pretty drunk today too.

We nicknamed Dokos (Δοκός) “Sex Island” because… well I don’t really remember. But I do remember that we made several sacrifices of stale pita and bread in an attempt to help all of us score more. We also decided to get a bit closer so the boys could attempt to do a bit of cliff diving. We got as close as we could, which still must have been a really far swim for them, and stopped the boat. The cliffs were pretty sheer and I’m sure required a decent amount of athletic ability to under-hang climb up over the part that was touching and being eroded by the sea.

Alisa and I were bored, and thought this would be the perfect opportunity for a bit of skinny dipping. We were already topless on the boat, so it really just required throwing off the bottoms and since Justin was the only boy around to ogle, we went for it. And honestly, it was pretty amazing. I haven’t always been the most comfortable naked person, but being that I feel like I’m becoming more European everyday, I’m starting to think it’s a fun new way to enjoy the water.

After we called the boys back from the cliffs and put our swimsuits back on just before they reached us with their goggles, we got back to the sailing. As if things couldn’t get better today, all the sudden, we notice that we are being followed by a school of dolphins. These guys were HUGE, at least 7-8 feet long and gorgeous. They weren’t the typical grey bottle nosed that you see back in the states but these gorgeous navy blue and grey striped. They jumped and played with our boat as we sailed along for at least 15 minutes while we snapped pictures and marveled at how amazingly beautiful they were.

We finally arrived in Spetses (Σπέτσες) just as the sun was setting. We joined up with the Sweaty Swea who said they saw some dolphins as well and in addition caught a bit of sea turtle and got in the water to swim around with the big guy. In Spetses, where we were, there is no actual marina where you can tie up, so what you have to do is anchor your boats in lines and then use dinghies to navigate your way to the coast. All 14 of us had dinner reservations together and parked our dinghies together on a little pebble beach.

Dinner was at these big long wooden tables and was pretty amazing. The only problem was, service was slow, and as such, Alisa and I killed two jugs (not bottles, but like 3 liter jugs) of wine before dinner even started. For dinner we had fried pork, meatballs, more tziki, sardines and this amazing potato salad that tasted a lot like the cold potato and garlic salad you can get as a tapa back home.

After dinner, TYW had a club set up for us a little farther in town. The club was ultra modern with all white interior and a cool centrally located round bar. They also had a great outdoor patio where it was much less sweaty and crowded and where I met the lesbian love of my life.

She’s Russian. And perfect.

I spent most of the night talking about how I was going to go talk to her, but never could get up the guts to do so. Then I finally went up to order drinks one time with Justin and realized very quickly why I will never be a lesbian. She asked me what I wanted, with a little cold Russian smile. And I freaked my shit out. I stuttered and stammered and looked at my feet and “uh, uh”-ed my way into a Vodka Tonic. She looked at me like I was diseased, made me a drink as quickly as she could and never made eye contact again.

Girls suck.

I think Louise realized rather quickly that she was stuck in close quarters with a bunch of idiots. As such, she began explaining everything. We had to be taught how to use a wench, how to wrap ropes around wenches, how to differentiate ropes, sails, how to tie knots, how to steer, upwind, downwind, what to do if the boat starts tipping too much, what to do if the boat doesn’t go anywhere, what to do if the boat goes to fast, buoys, engines, depths, sonar, blah blah blah BLAH. The most important lesson she taught us quick was “do what I tell you to, when I tell you to and don’t fuck it up or we capsize and get eaten by sharks.”

Ok well she didn’t say it in so many words, but we got the picture.

I think we learned pretty quickly. And by “we” I really mean, all the men on the boat, because Alisa and I did relatively nothing. We offered, and if we happened to be sitting in the right spot, we were allowed to wench or tie or pull or open or whatever. But for the most part, Alisa and I laid on the front of the boat topless to help motivate our sailors.

Someone’s gotta do it.

Sunday was a pretty easy sail. We only had to go a short distance to Poros (Πόρος) across the bay, which I believe was strategy to help get everyone together safely after our first day.

Poros was absolutely stunning. The marina was large and as such we all had space to park our boats along the road and have direct access to the shore. After we arrived, we restocked ourselves at the grocery store on the things we hadn’t thought about buying the day before (dish soap, sponges, more trash bags, and even more eggs – gypsy omelets take a lot of eggs).

Most of the afternoon was spent socializing. We hosted a plethora of tequila shots on the boat and got introduced to our fellow yachters. We gravitated quickly to naked San Diego, as A) they were Americans and B) they were naked 90% of the time. At first, I hated them for their perfect fake boobs, their 18 inch waists and their perfect blonde hair extensions. But some of them ended up being kind of cool and the couple that sucked ended up providing ENDLESS entertainment for the rest of the week.  In addition we a really cool group of Spanish girls from Madrid. Louise’s brother was also skippering a different boat of Spaniards and we tended to stick with them most of the week. Only two of them could speak English, which sucked for skipper Phillip being Swedish. In addition to not speaking much English, they were kind of douche bags. As even when I spoke to them in Spanish they still sucked.

Dinner on Poros was at a restaurant called Oasis. It was about a 50 yard walk from our boat. We had a Greek feast of lamb, fish, Greek salad, Greek wine, tziki dip. The dinner we would pretty much have at every restaurant from here on out.

From dinner, we walked over to a pre-party being held at a club literally 10 feet from our boat. Tequila shots ensued, a bit of dancing.

At one point, Iggy decided to have a gypsy whistle blowing party. After about 5 blows (exhausting, I know) we started dancing again only to hear… a return call. Someone else was blowing a whistle back at me. We fist pumped and cheered and began walking around the club blowing the gypsy whistle until we found our fellow whistle blower.

If you guys recall my post back in March about my friend Sean who started a company called Falling Whistles. Well, turns out my whistle blowing actually found me another Falling Whistle. No shit y’all. In the middle of Greece, I find another person out there who not only OWNS a Falling Whistle, but he freaking WORKS THERE. We bonded over our mutual friends, talked about what’s been going on, he congratulated me on my dinosaur whistle and we toasted over a tequila shot (naturally).

But seriously, what are the chances?

Sponsored by InsureandGo Travel Insurance

Call it a bit of Christmas Eve jitters, but we were awake and out of the hotel as fast as possible on Saturday morning in an attempt to arrive at the port in Lavrio (Λαύριο) and get our trip started off immediately. What we didn’t know, is that the skippers are required to get on your boat, and our skipper wasn’t told to be in Lavrio until 4 PM.

Cue 6 hours of sitting on the dock waiting.

Drinking.

Waiting some more.

Then we had this great idea to go get some food. So we walked to a restaurant close to the port and sat down for lunch. They offered a large array of alcoholic beverages… and club sandwiches. And that’s it. So we ordered 5 beers and 5 club sandwiches and..

Drank.

And ate. And waited some more.

Our sister boat, the Swea of Sweden (hereby known as the Sweaty Swea) included Manuel, Iggy, Alex, Tom & Ken (the twins), Whitney and Libby. The Sweaty Swea’s skipper was Mark, hailing from the UK. The Freja (my boat – having no stinky nickname because Louise kept us more or less in ship shape) consisted of myself, Justin, Mitch, Matt, Tom, Jon and Alisa. Our skipper Louise came down here from Sweden and was the tiniest drill sergeant I’ve ever seen.

The Sweaty Swea’s skipper, Mark, had arrived early and was ready for his rager. So they headed to the grocery store and got out of port before Louise even got to town. In addition to our minor skipper delay, Alisa, the Freja’s last to arrive passenger, had missed a connection flying in due to “Poland sucking” and was now stuck in Warsaw set to arrive in Athens about 9 PM. The immediate future looked grim for the Freja so we did what any group of self respecting bored people do.

We drank some more.

After Louise finally arrived, Justin inspected the boat with her while the rest of us headed to the grocery store to pack the necessary supplies for a week of sailing. This rounded out to be about €300 in junk food, hangover breakfast, beer and water.

We loaded the boat, headed to a gyro place for cheap dinner and then back to the original bar we had visited earlier in the night for our first night out.

Sponsored by Holiday Autos for Cheap Car Hire in Greece.

Of course there have been others, or people specific names. Emily and Jennifer call me Gabbey or Gabbeygail. My guy friends in elementary school used to call me Crabby Abbey (or Hacked off Hesser). In college a lot of my friends called me Yankee (because everything north of Texas is “the North” and since Oklahoma, albeit still a southern state, is north of Texas, I am a yankee). I probably hated Yankee the most. Even more than Hacked off Hesser.

Ya, I’ve had my fair share of nicknames. But not one has been more appropriately accurate than Gypsy.

I’m not sure who coined it first, but I’m going to give credit to Justin. Justin’s been around through all my nickname days (is likely guilty of having called me Crabby Abbey at some point) having been a friend of mine since we were… well… like 7.

Anyway. The backstory.

I bought a car in Spain. A good solid reliable car I bought from someone I knew, I knew the history, I knew they took good care of it. I bought the car on a Monday. On the Tuesday. driving down to the grocery store for the first time, I found my power steering and air conditioning go out and my emergency light came on. I drove it to the garage to find that my timer belt had broken somehow and I was going to be out about €500 to fix it.

Fine.

Bad luck. Yes. But fine. It’s a very used car. It hadn’t had problems in over 4 years. Could be slightly expected.

10 days later, the day before I left for Greece, I picked my car up from the shop. I thanked the guy for the help, told him I hoped I didn’t see him for a long time. And I drove off. 15 minutes later, I arrived back at my house, went to back my car into my parking spot but couldn’t get it into gear. Then I tried to put it back into first, no go. Nothing. No gears. I call the shop back in tears, tell them my dilemma and they say they’ll come pick the car up on Monday, but they won’t today because they’re closed. I left for Greece and told them they could come pick up the car, but not to fix anything without consulting me. I knew if it was the gear box, and it was not something they had done when they fixed it the first time, I was going to be out about another €1000 which I knew, I didn’t have in my bank account.

A week later, sitting in a hotel room in Palaia Fokaia, I hadn’t heard from them when I got a text message from Bank of America saying my account was under my designated threshold. I had $22.90 in my account. They had charged me for my car, without asking me and I was out of money.

Justin to the rescue. My pimp daddy for the week, said he would be glad to help me out with whatever I needed and I could pay him back later. This, combined with the fact that I quit my normal job to go play with ponies in gypsy country (Andalucía) was the birth of the Gypsy. From that point, it was just a way to coin everything I did. Here is a dictionary of commonly used terms.

Gypsy jobs – begging for money, or performing *ahem* special acts for money
Gypsy omelettes – I worked off some of my debt cooking breakfast for the boat, Gypsy omelets have peppers, onions and Feta cheese usually accompanied by bacon and toast
Gypsy juice – Summer wine, Tinto de Verano or red wine with Sprite
Modified Gypsy juice – Rebojito, or white wine with Sprite
Gypsy whistle – either my Falling Whistle, or the sound it makes to round up all my little sailors
Gypsy headband – any headband I wore during the week which managed to meander it’s way down onto my forehead the drunker I got
Gypsy jams – for the 5 minutes when my iPod made it onto the deck and a bit of Flamenco music came on
Gypsy bed – my sleep sheet
Gypsy money – any coins.

The list goes on. But so you get any further references to the Gypsy, a little explanation was necessary.

First off, I did not take all of the photos in the Yacht Week posts. I have republished them with permission from my dear Yacht Week participants as seen in the following group picture of our crew.

From Left to Right: Alisa Greene, Jon Farr, Mitch Hall, Ignacio Leon, Tom Mains, Louise Wistrand (skipper), Matt Cowan, Alex DiCarlo, Justin Anderson, Tom and Ken Samples, Manuel Calvin, Whitney Kelly, Libby Grosspietsch and Mark (skipper).

In addition, I have pulled some pictures from the Yacht Week’s official facebook page from our week, Week 31 Greece. The whole album is public and can be found here.

The montage video is courtesy of Ignacio Leon who did a great job putting it together.

All other video’s are by me.

I will attempt now to explain to you what I willingly subjected myself to for 8 days on my most recent Greece holiday.

You know those vacation packages set up for families where you rent a mobile home for a week and you are given a map with several destinations through, say, the Rocky Mountains, that you should visit and each night you meet up with all the other families that are driving around in their rented mobile homes and have hoedowns and campfires and tell stories about the old days? You know, those vacations where at 20 years old your grandpa came up to you and said “darlin’, don’t tell your mom, but here’s a beer. now, you probably won’t like it at first, but you’ll get used to the taste. don’t act too drunk or you’ll get me in trouble.”

Ya, Yacht Week is just like that. Only it’s yachts instead of mobile homes. You’re with 7 of your hottest best friends instead of your family. Instead of going somewhere lame like the Rockies, you’re sailing around the Greek isles. And instead of roasting marshmallows and singing Kumbayah, you’re taking body shots off a victoria secret model, beer bonging out of a life vest and jumping off a trampoline on the back of a 50 foot catamaran into the Mediterranean Sea… naked. Oh and grandpa’s not sneaking you a beer. It’s Paolo*, you’re Italian skipper and he’s handing you two pills with smiley faces on them.”

“Don’t tell your mom”

No, Yacht Week is unlike anything else in the world.

Basically. You sign up with friends to rent a boat. Depending on the size of boat and how many people you cram on, determines how much you end up paying. On Day one you all meet up and load your boat for the week. For the next 7 or so days, you then sail from one island to the next. Our Yacht Week was in Greece, but they also do Turkey holidays, Croatia holidays, weeks in Italy and in the British Virgin Islands. Each day you are on a set course from one island to another and each night, you meet up with the rest of the Yacht Week participants (depending on your location, it’s a different amount of boats – for Greece it was about 30 Yachts, for Croatia I heard it can be up to 80). There is generally a set location for dinner where reservations are made as well as a club or series of clubs where your wristband gets you free entry to an all night party.

Yacht Week does all the organizing, including providing you with a Skipper to sail your boat if you have no one on board that is licensed to do so. When you arrive at your new location, you generally have a half day or so to explore before dinner and the night time festivities begin. In addition, most nights, the boats are all tied to one another and anchored in a way that requires climbing from one to another to get to the shore. Because not everyone eats dinner at the same time, there are constant pre and post parties on the boats.

The schedule is rigorous. Partying until 5-6 AM (some people later) and then waking up at 8:30 or 9 to begin sailing for the day. The cabins on the boat are too hot to sleep in during the day but the deck is too loud. Some boats smelled and looked like what you could imagine the inside of your stomach looks like after a night of drinking. That stench of vomit mixed with Johnny Walker mixed with latex with absolute debauchery strewn about on the floor: bottles of Diet Coke, Tequila and Red Bull and unidentified stickiness covering every surface not already covered by discarded undergarments and condom wrappers.

But like the worst hangovers, a dirty sticky boat is a telltale sign of a good night. And like the say in Sweden, the sweatier the Swea, the harder you raged.

* Paolo is not a real skipper, unfortunately. Sorry Louise, no offense, but you’re… well… a woman.