Everybody’s on Hydra anyway, so this is just another drop filling the ocean. Condé Nast says Hydra is Europe’s best island, which is both correct, and nasty, because it means more people will keep coming.

Though, not with the Flying Cat. The blog’s industrious co-photographer has suffered much during our stay on Hydra this year, because whenever I saw a ferry, and we saw them a lot, I would exclaim that it’s not a Flying Cat. Hellenic Seaways decided that the vessels operating under the name Flying Cat were not state-of-the-art enough and sold them off to other operators. Flying Cat 3 is now somewhat unpoetically called Superspeed Jet 3 and serves Cycladic locations as part of the Sea Jets fleet. (The whole point of traveling these seas is to be…slow? Think of Odysseus.)

The reason why I rarely finish anything on time is that I go off on unexpected tangents. In our present context, I wanted to ascertain which was the first Flying Cat we ever took. This meant stirring the dust on various shelves where I keep my journals, only to realise that the  booking had been electronic. We’d circled Piraeus port almost fully, looking for a gate (always E7, but we did not know that) and a helpful taxi driver suggested we buy the ticket online, as it would display the gate. I stirred the metaphorical dust of my inbox, found the link to the booking. Six years later, evidently, the link no longer worked. The number of our first ever Flying Cat will thus remain shrouded in mystery.

The currently serving Hellenic Seaways fleet is made up of vessels named Aeros, which, I believe, could be named AeroCats. This idea, which I also repeated whenever I saw the ferries, felt particularly tedious to the blog’s industrious co-photographer and he was hoping I would never speak of it again, which is why I felt compelled to tell anybody who would listen (or not) about it.

As a form of useless revenge, we eschewed Hellenic Seways altogether and took the Alpha Lines SpeedCat I. The SpeedCat does not, however, call at Poros these days, which is mildly disappointing, because I have a fondness for the slow progress through the scenic port, and staff rhythmically calling out ‘arrival with immediate departure’. While the English is decidedly prosaic, the Greek always sounds like it could be a mysterious incantation. (The oracle tells you that any arrival is inherently a departure, in life as in death.)

This year, we decided to pursue our goal of eventually checking out all the island’s restaurants, which is realistic if one keeps returning. The approach is that we’ll always visit the nostalgic classics: Kai Kremmidi where we had our first ever meal on the island (yoghurt kebab, still as good as the first time around, and you can’t say that about too many things in life), Taverna Lulu’s for the meatballs, Xeri Elia for the imam and Kodylenia’s which has both the best sunset view on the island (decidedly better than the alluringly named Sunset restaurant) and the most lovably irate waiter in all of Greece. The man neared an apoplectic fit when we ordered both tsipouro AND wine. The combination of a shot and then a glass of wine/beer is generally confusing to Greek waiters, but none of them can fly into a holy rage quite like our man in Kodylenia’s. Long may he live and get livid over the smallest quirks of his patrons.

Having indulged in the classics, we concentrated our efforts on the hitherto untried. Like Omilos. Which, if you’ve been to Hydra at least once, might come as a surprise, because it’s in perhaps the most frequented area on the island, and quite famous for once having been a nightclub loved by the jet set, the Lagoudera. For years now the ritual would be passing by the Omilos almost every day, mentioning that we should go to the Omilos and then not going to the Omilos.

This would be the year then, but it almost wasn’t: we thought booking one week in advance would be enough, but, with weddings and birthday parties, we could barely be squeezed into a late evening slot. By Mediterranean standards 9:30 PM might not even be that late, but my Central European stomach felt flummoxed by such unexpected side quests. We also carefully slalomed through all the seafood in the menu- to be more precise, the menu IS seafood, and, to the waiter’s polite dismay, we went for the only two dishes which didn’t contain any fish or octopi staring back at you. The meal was lovely, so were the desserts- and the wine, a very reasonably priced Agiorgitiko.

Otherwise, the Omilos is evidently on the expensive side, just like Hydra itself- it’s an expensive island, I must admit to myself whenever I recommend it to people. It’s not prohibitive, and there are ways of making it budget friendly, but there’s a higher than usual incidence of yachting Americans, and prices very much take them into account. Our yachting Americans at Omilos were getting gradually drunker, and one blonde Valkyrie in an impossibly tiny knit dress mistook a cupboard for the toilet door. It was all very entertaining in a White Lotus way. If Mike White is considering a Greek instalment for the series, he should look no further than Hydra.

One morning, I sat in front of the bakery in the port and listened to a distinguished signora carefully walking a distant interlocutor through the minutiae of how Hydra is esattamente like Portofino, but also not esattamente like Portofino, for one, the rancid coffee and she wasn’t sure about the cornetto either, because Greek chocolate is molto amaro, eh. The sun had just risen over the hilltops, and two yachts were maneuvering in and out the port, respectively, and gently collided, to the vociferous horror of their crew. Amerikanoi, chuckled the man at the neighbouring table and then a stern lady from the port authority talked sense into the unruly rabble because the ferries were coming, and they were not coming in the expected order. This is NOT the boat for Piraeus, the stern lady yelled, and one elderly gentleman with a suitcase the size of a cupboard hesitated for a long time, then hopped on in the very last second, as the stairs were being lifted, and a steward hoisted the cupboard-suitcase over the edge. If he is headed for Athens, he’ll have a mighty old surprise, the public on the bakery terrace concluded.

The Mikra Anglia was a mixed experience: my ossobuco was sumptuous but the blog’s industrious co-photographer had what he described as one of the worst stakes of his life. It’s always sad to see people who love food suffer disappointment. Their despair is so real, it’s almost a form of mourning. On a brighter note, he also partook in great culinary joy in the nearby Lemon Trees, where a batch of tiropita was baked expressly for him after he’d exalted its qualities over those of mere spanakopita. You guessed it right; he is very much not a vegetarian. Which is why he loved Ostria and the giant plate of loukaniko which we dug into at a table rather ominously perched above the whitewashed stairs leading to the port. As the waitresses fleeted around, rearranging tables and chairs to accommodate new arrivals, and conversations became ever more boisterous as the evening progressed, a blonde woman sat in wondrous stillness, occasionally lifting a glass of crisp white wine for a small sip. I am only having the oysters, she mentioned, to no one really, with the raspy voice of a film noir heroine. They’re the best oysters in town.

Pirofani must have had spectacular patrons, too, back in the day. Their poems and sketches, which you can still bump into on random shelves on the island, or even online, if you enter this particular rabbit hole, pay tribute to a lost world, while the restaurant’s new iteration is an altogether fresher, younger thing, more urbane, one could say, even if Hydra is everything but a city. I felt that the meal was almost too polished, and I drank plenty of wine to appease that worst kind of nostalgia, for places and times you haven’t even known. Enough wine, in the end, to get a firsthand account of what Leonard Cohen meant by that drunk in the midnight choir.

‘Is that Athens!?’, the blog’s industrious co-photographer enquired when he saw the picture on the wall of Il Casta, whereupon the Neapolitan chef almost had a heart attack. It’s Napoli! I knew it was Napoli, but said nothing, waited for the world to burn. It didn’t.  I have a fondness for Neapolitans, though we do not see eye to eye in footballing matters, which are of course both the least and most important matters in the world. But they sure know how to cook, and Il Casta is no exception. On top of this, I become particularly worked up about niche sorts of pasta (in our case, scialatielli) yet the silly thing is…I don’t really feel like Italian food when I am in Greece. I take that as a sign that I haven’t yet spent enough time in Greece, for after a while, surely, you’ll finally crave some Chinese takeout. In which case, should you be on Hydra, you’ll have to take the Aero to Athens.

And did I mention they should call them AeroCats?

(Pictures are somewhat illustrative but mostly random, with definitely more cats than AeroCats. Material form previous years, some of which may be (moderately) useful for travelers to Hydra can be found here.

Our cover boy is Raf, the beloved resident ginger cat of Taverna Lefteraki’s, on Mandraki beach. As a kitten, Raf used to love stealing from beach bags, but is now a distinguished, if strong willed, gentleman.)