Is Your Omphalos An Outty Thursday Surf & Culture Report

 

Lost Boys & Co...

Here's LoLa ready to run through the gate and take a lap.  We're at original stadium in Olympia, Greece where the Olympic games originated and where they still light the torch that travels to each site.  It turns out that they held games in Greece all over the Peloponnese, but every four years they convened at Olympia for the big event.  It's a site rich in antiquity and there are a couple of museums there and tons of artifacts...  True to form, much of it was ruined when the Christians took over.  It's always been tough being a pagan...

Good session this morning with mostly sunny skies and 10 miles visibility.  Light winds 1 - 3kts from the ENE and the sea surface was smooth to glassy.  The air temp was 58.7 and the water was 68.5.  High tide was at 10:58am +6.0' and low tide will follow at 5:42pm +0.1'.  We have a SW swell out of 216º at 3.3' and it was 3' to almost 4 on the rising tide.  Oddly enough the low tide seemed to help things early, so check it out...

Here we are somewhere around sea level in the Pyrgos-Dirou Caves (#2).  These caverns were discovered in the late 1800's, but not opened to the public until 1963.  It's an extensive cave system and it takes you about 45 minutes to float through all of the subterranean lagoons and ogle all of the formations.  The gondolier of your boat calls out the names of the caverns and formations in Greek and we were just lucky enough to have a woman who spoke Greek and translated his descriptions.   We should say that we found Greek to be as impenetrable a language as "Greek to me" suggests.  In three weeks we learned "thank you" (ehf-hah-ree-stoh) and "Good morning!" (kah-lee-meh-rah).  Beyond that it was charades...

The Lion's Gate (#3) dates from around 1300 BC and guards the entrance to Mycenae.  They must have been fairly worried about invaders because the stone lintel over the gate weighs an estimated 18 tons.  When classic era Greeks came upon this site they figured that the legendary Perseus (famous for slaying Medusa) built the city with help from his side-kick the cyclops.  Unfortunately, the lion's heads have been gone for ages, but they suspect that they might have been made of gold and of course were plundered immediately...

The Theater of Epidavros (#4) from circa 300 BC is one of the best preserved theaters of the ancient world.  LoLa stood in the middle of the orchestra (the circle in the middle of the stage) and spoke in her normal tone of voice and we could hear her perfectly from the back row!  It seats about 15,000 people and they still use it for events.  A real tribute to Greek mathematics and architecture...

In Delphi (#5) which is an incredible archaeological site, we found the "Omphalos."  Omphalos is navel and the ancients considered Delphi the center of the world and the omphalos is the center of Delphi.  You find it along the "Sacred Way" and here we find the Professor contemplating it, as one should.  Since Delphi was the center of the world, that meant that it was also the starting point for history and fate.  From here the Oracle would predict the course of human events...  This was years before Las Vegas...

You will recall that tomorrow we will be dining at Greenbelt.  As is the case in Hermosa, we made reservations by talking to Mike the manager as he was walking on the pier.  See you at 5:30...

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"When the surf breaks, we'll fix it"
The Professor!!