The eastern Aegean, the strip of sea between Kastellorizo and the coast of Asia Minor, is one of the quieter corners of the Mediterranean. Quiet in two ways: the water is rarely crowded, and the species that share it with us tend to be private. We don't go looking for them. They surface, sometimes, when we cut the engine.
This is what swims here, who we see, and what we have learned to ask of the water.
Caretta caretta — the loggerhead.
The loggerhead is the most familiar of our neighbours. Caretta caretta has navigated these waters for around thirty million years — older than the Aegean itself, older than most of what we call Greece. The Mediterranean population is small (estimated 7,200 to 9,000 nesting females across the entire sea), and Greece is one of its most important nesting countries.
Females travel hundreds of kilometres to lay their eggs on a handful of beaches — Zakynthos, Kyparissia, parts of Crete and Rhodes. They do not nest on Kastellorizo (our beaches are rocky, not sandy), but the surrounding waters are a feeding and resting ground. We see them most often in the morning, near the harbour mouth, breathing at the surface for a few seconds before they go again.
"You will see her once, perhaps. If you do, hold still. She is older than the engine you came on."
Out of every thousand hatchlings born on Greek beaches, perhaps one will reach reproductive age. Nature is not gentle. We try to be: we cut the engine when we see one surface, we never anchor in seagrass meadows where they feed, and we ask guests to never throw food into the sea — bread is bad for them, and a fed turtle stops fearing boats, which is the worst thing that can happen to her.
Monachus monachus — the monk seal.
If the loggerhead is familiar, the Mediterranean monk seal is the opposite — rare, shy, and one of the most endangered marine mammals in the world. Fewer than 800 individuals are left, and roughly half of them live in Greek waters. The Dodecanese, including Kastellorizo, is one of their last quiet pockets.
We don't see them often. Maybe two, three encounters in a season — a head breaking the surface in a hidden cove, watching us back. They give birth in sea caves with hidden underwater entrances; the cliff of Fokiali, on the south side of the island, has at least one such cave that we know about and never approach.
Our rule is simple: if you see a monk seal, do not chase her, do not film her with a flying drone, do not whistle. Watch quietly, count yourself fortunate, leave her alone. She will not be there when you go back the next day.
Pterois miles — the lionfish that arrived.
Then there is the newer story. The lionfish — Pterois miles — was not here ten years ago. It is native to the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, and it crossed into the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal somewhere in the 2010s. It has since spread fast across the eastern Mediterranean, and around 2018 we began to see it regularly in our waters.
It is a beautiful fish. Striped red, white, and orange, with long feathered fins, and venomous spines along its back that can give a swimmer a memorable trip to the harbour clinic. It hunts smaller native fish, and because the Mediterranean has no large predator that has learned to eat it, its numbers are growing.
Greek and Cypriot researchers, with the help of fishermen, are now trying to control the population — partly through targeted spearfishing, partly by encouraging restaurants to put it on the menu (it is excellent eating, when prepared by someone who knows the spines). It is a hard, slow piece of work, and one of the more tangible front lines of climate-driven change in this sea.
And the plastic.
We could write the rest of this article about plastic. We will not. It is enough to say: every single trip we make, we collect at least one piece of floating plastic from the sea. Sometimes a bottle, sometimes a fragment of a bag, sometimes the cap of something. The eastern Mediterranean has one of the highest concentrations of marine plastic in the world, and a turtle that mistakes a plastic bag for a jellyfish does not have a second chance.
Our boat carries a small mesh bag for this purpose. If you sail with us and see something on the water, please point. We will detour. It costs us nothing, and the small accumulation, repeated, is the only honest answer to the problem.
Natura 2000 — what is protected, and how.
The marine zone around Kastellorizo, Ro and Strongyli is registered as Natura 2000 site GR4210003 — a European-protected area since 2011. The designation does not mean entry is restricted; it means specific human activities (industrial fishing, anchoring in seagrass, certain construction) are.
We work inside that framework. We anchor only in sand or rock, never in Posidonia oceanica (the seagrass that is the nursery of half the species in this article). We cut the engine when wildlife surfaces. We tell our guests, gently, what is fragile and why.
Our quiet vow.
There is no badge for any of this, no certificate we earn. It is simply how the people who live here learn to use this water — patiently, without taking too much of it, paying attention to what is older and rarer than we are.
When you sail with us, you sail with that. It is not a tour add-on. It is the route.
