Sailing Greece - Yacht Charter Ionian Islands Sailing Routes & Chart, Ionian Sea Greece

From the heel of Italy most yachts cross the Otranto Strait to Corfu (Kerkyra), which is located just 70 miles away. Corfu (Kerkyra) is the first of the seven Ionian Islands.

Traveling south from Corfu (Kerkyra) you will reach the islands of Paxi and Antipaxi, Lefkada (Lefkas), Ithaki, Kefalonia (Cephalonia), Zakynthos (Zante) and Kythira (Kythera).

To those of you who visualize a Greece of sun-baked rock dotted with dazzling whitewashed houses, the Ionian Islands comes as a wonderful surprise.

This is not the Greece of the popular travel brochure but a shaded green country, sheltering red tiled Latin houses an eccentric collection of Italian and French architecture and English tastes (in Corfu the locals play cricket and you can buy currant buns and ginger beer) fused together to create a land that is indisputably Greek.

Evergreen cypress, pine and elm trees, green fields, flowers even in height of summer, and everywhere the dark sheen of the olive fruit, are characteristics of the lower land while higher up the slopes are covered in pine trees.

If the wind blows in the right direction, you can smell the pungent herby aroma a mile out to sea. The green lushness of the islands contrast with the high craggy mountains of Albania and mainland Greece that are located on the eastern coast of the Ionian Sea.

This barren backdrop of the islands is just a taste of the geographical morphology to come. Between the isles there are protected waters where the wind seldom blows strongly and a multitude of lazy anchorages that are accessible only by yacht.

Sailing south past the islands of Lefkada (Lefkas), Ithaki and Kefalonia (Cephalonia), you reach Zakynthos (Zante), whose landscape resembles the rolling English countryside, and meet the rocky slopes of the Peloponnese.