TYW Day 6 (Part 2): Drinks like a… cat?

You may assume that the after the events with Louise’s sailor-mouth, we breezed into port, parked and had a nice leisurely day strolling about Hydra’s old beautiful Greek-ness. But if so, you obviously do not know me well, as there was much more drama to ensue.

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.