When a client tells me “we want Greece”, nine times out of ten they picture the Cyclades: white houses, blue domes, Mykonos and Santorini. I never talk anyone out of it — I wrote a whole episode of this series about it. But I always ask one question first: how does your family cope with wind? Because from July to September the Aegean gets the meltemi, it can blow for three or four days at a stretch, and every plan has to be written in pencil. The Ionian is the same country with an entirely different character: more rain in winter, so the islands are green with cypress, olive and pine, and in summer it is simply calm. The water can sit like a swimming pool until midday. This time the boat was M/Y WHATEVER — a Riva 88 built in 2012 and comprehensively refitted in 2025, 27 metres: eight guests in four cabins, four professional crew, stabilisers, a bathing platform, and a garage holding an AB385 tender with a 170HP engine, a three-seat jet ski and two paddleboards. We boarded on Corfu and headed south.
Day 1 — Corfu and a first evening below the Old Fortress
Embarkation at Gouvia → the old town → at anchor off Kanoni
We came aboard in the early afternoon at Gouvia marina, a few miles north of town. Corfu is a special case in Greece — four centuries of Venice, then the French and the British, and never Ottoman rule, so the old town looks more like Venice than a Greek island: tall, narrow houses in faded pink, the arcades of the Liston modelled on the Rue de Rivoli, and cricket on the esplanade, left behind by the English. We had a late lunch in the lanes behind the Liston, came back aboard and moved only a few miles south, off Kanoni, anchoring opposite Pontikonisi — Mouse Island, the one with a single chapel and a clump of cypresses that anyone who has ever seen a brochure about Greece will recognise. The first evening always looks the same with me: the aft deck, an Aperol Spritz, and watching the port switch its lights on. Here the Venetian Old Fortress lit up too, uplit from below on its rock spit. The chef served dinner on deck: fresh seafood from the market in town and grilled fish, with a wine from Zakynthos — an island we would reach five days later.
Day 2 — Water you struggle to believe
Corfu → the west coast of Paxos → Antipaxos (Vrika, Voutoumi) → Gaios
I was up at first light and did what I do on every charter: coffee and the flybridge. The sea flat as a sheet of glass, the channel between Corfu and the mainland still in the shadow of the mountains of Epirus, and that boundless calm you cannot buy ashore at any price. After breakfast we ran thirty miles south to Paxos. The western side of that island is a wall of white limestone a hundred metres high, cut with caves — you take the tender in under Ortholithos, the lone rock pillar standing in the water, and go into grottoes where light reflected off the bottom turns electric blue. But the real reason you come here lies a few miles further on: Antipaxos, an islet with two bays, Vrika and Voutoumi, where the water is a colour you cannot photograph honestly, because nobody believes the picture has not been pushed. We stayed there until late afternoon and simply swam. No toys, no jet ski, nothing — water like that needs nothing added. In the evening we came into Gaios, the port of Paxos, which is really a channel between the island and the green islet of Agios Nikolaos, with a row of Venetian houses along one side.
Day 3 — The cliffs of Lefkada
Gaios → Porto Katsiki and Egremni → Sivota on Lefkada
On the third day we ran forty miles further south, along the western edge of Lefkada. It is the most spectacular stretch in the whole Ionian and you can only see it from the water: ten kilometres of vertical, blinding white cliff with narrow strips of shingle at its foot — Egremni and Porto Katsiki. You get down there by steps cut into the rock, or not at all, since an earthquake took some of the access away. We came in from the sea, anchored a few dozen metres off the shore and swam in water that is a couple of degrees cooler in the cliff's shadow and even clearer for it. For the evening we went into Sivota — not the one on the mainland, but the bay on the south of Lefkada: a natural horseshoe, an entrance as narrow as a gate, silence inside and a line of tavernas right on the quay. We ate on board, but the smell of grilled octopus carried across the whole bay.
From my experience as a broker, two things you will not find in the brochure. First: in Greece a commercial yacht must hold a valid Greek charter licence, and the guest list is filed with the authorities before departure — this is not a formality you “sort out on the day”, and it is the first thing I check on any boat before I even show her to a client. Second: Greek charters are invoiced with VAT, and the rate depends on where the trip starts and ends. A one-way route from Corfu to Kefalonia can also carry the cost of running the yacht back to her base. All of it can be arranged so the numbers make sense — but you need to know about it when you are choosing dates and ports, not a week before departure.
Day 4 — The cave where a submarine used to hide
Sivota → Meganisi (Papanikolis, Spartochori) → Vathi
The fourth day was short and lazy — ten miles to Meganisi, the island east of Lefkada, so ragged in outline that from above it looks like a spilled stain. On its south-western shore is the Papanikolis cave: an entrance twenty metres high and a chamber a hundred and fifty metres deep, into which the Greek submarine of that name is said to have slipped during the Second World War to sit out enemy patrols. We went in by tender, came out, and spent the rest of the day at anchor in one of the side coves where the forest runs down to the water and there is nothing but a few goats. In the afternoon we moved across to Spartochori — a village clinging to the slope above a small harbour, with a taverna you reach by walking down a staircase. We spent the evening in Vathi. There was not a single item on that day's programme worth writing home about, and that is probably exactly why everyone remembers it best.
Day 5 — Ithaca, and ice cream in Fiskardo
Vathi → Ithaca (Gidaki, Kioni) → Fiskardo on Kefalonia
On the fifth day we went to Ithaca. That Ithaca — Odysseus' island, the one he spent ten years getting back to, and having seen it from the sea I begin to understand why it was worth it. The bay of Vathi is like a fjord: a narrow entrance and a town laid out around the whole horseshoe inside. A few miles on lies Gidaki, a beach with no road to it — boat or a walk over the hill — so there are usually a handful of people there and nothing else. We had lunch at anchor, swam, and in the afternoon moved to Kioni, a village with three windmills on the point, of which one of my guests said it looks like a village built by someone who wanted people to like it. In the evening we crossed the strait to Fiskardo on Kefalonia — the only village on the island that survived the 1953 earthquake, so the Venetian houses there are the real thing rather than post-war copies. And there we performed the ritual this series has permanently built in: gelato from the shop on the waterfront, eaten sitting on the wall, watching the yachts lying stern-to.
The Cyclades have to be won from the wind. The Ionian simply waits for you.
— Tomasz Wrzesiński, yacht broker, Monaco
Day 6 — The wreck you cannot walk to
Fiskardo → Assos and Myrtos → Zakynthos: the Blue Caves and Navagio → Porto Vromi
The sixth day is the one you come here for, and this is where the Riva showed what those two engines and those lines are for. We left straight after breakfast along Kefalonia's west coast: first Assos, a Venetian village on an isthmus below a ruined fortress, then Myrtos — the beach everyone knows from calendars, white shingle between two slopes, with water above it a colour found nowhere else on the island. From there it is forty-odd miles south to Zakynthos, and this is exactly the situation in which “too far” turns into “why not”. Off the island's northern cape, below Skinari, are the Blue Caves: arches washed out of white limestone, under which the water glows from beneath as if lit by a lamp. A few miles down the west coast lies Navagio — a bay closed in by a three-hundred-metre cliff, with the rusting hull of a smugglers' ship on white shingle. You approach from the water and only from the water; nobody has been landing on the beach itself for several seasons now, because the cliff keeps shedding rock, so you look at it from anchor or from a drift. It changes nothing. That is the picture that makes a deck go quiet and everybody put their phones down — the real magic of this week. We spent the night at Porto Vromi, a few miles on, in a narrow green inlet. Dinner: grilled fresh fish and a local wine.
Day 7 — An easy run back north
Porto Vromi → Kefalonia → Argostoli
The last morning looked exactly like the six before it: coffee on the flybridge, a sea like glass, the west coast of Zakynthos still in shadow. We went north at an easy pace, in no hurry, and around lunchtime stopped once more at anchor on the way — a last swim, a last hour in water that had not once been cold all week. After that it was sun loungers, books and Kefalonia growing slowly off the port side. We came into Argostoli in the late afternoon, tanned and suspiciously quiet. Stepping off WHATEVER's deck I thought what I think every time I come back from the Ionian: this is the cruising ground for people who want a week on the water to be an actual rest, rather than a daily negotiation with the weather.
What it costs, and what you should know
M/Y WHATEVER — Riva 88, built 2012 and comprehensively refitted in 2025, 27 metres, 8 guests in 4 cabins (3 doubles + 1 twin), 4 professional crew, stabilisers underway and at anchor, high-speed Wi-Fi, bathing platform, AB385 tender with a 170HP engine, a three-seat jet ski and two paddleboards — charters in the range of €50,000–€55,000 per week for the 2026 season, plus APA of roughly €15,000–€16,500, plus VAT and port fees. APA is an advance against running costs — fuel, provisioning, marinas, port dues — reconciled to the euro at the end of the week. WHATEVER's cruising area covers the Cyclades, the Dodecanese and the Ionian Islands, so the same boat covers both this week and Santorini and Mykonos, if next time you want the other face of Greece.
Something you will not find in the brochure: the Ionian is the one Greek cruising ground where, in high summer, you can realistically plan day by day. The whole route in this logbook is under a hundred and sixty miles from Corfu to Zakynthos, so a week here is not about covering distance — it is about being in each of these places at the right hour: Antipaxos before noon, the Lefkada cliffs while they are still in shadow, Navagio when the sun comes into the bay. The same route in the wrong order is the same yacht and an entirely different holiday. And one more thing: not every boat advertised as “Greek” holds the paperwork to charter legally in Greece, and not every one-way itinerary ends with the invoice you were expecting. With a specific yacht and a specific week, checking that and setting the order is my job. You have the map; a guide is still worth having.
Want to actually sail this route? WHATEVER works the Ionian Islands, the Cyclades and the Dodecanese. Tell me when you are going and who with — I will check availability and the boat's paperwork and build the week around you. See this charter →
Enquiries: tomek@wyachts.com | WhatsApp +33 6 72 85 87 30 — Tomasz Wrzesiński, W Yachts Monaco.