Discovering Crete with SwimTrek

26 July 2025

I took off from Gatwick on Saturday the 19th with Maia and Zara to start my first Swimtrek Swimming Holiday ever, their Crete Discovery swim. After Maia guided for them in both 2023 and 2024, and came back with tales of gorgeous waters, engaging guides and great guests/swimmers on the tours, we worked to find a trip that could mesh with our calendars. It was unfortunate we couldn't have Monica also join us, to make it a complete "Dad & Daughters" trip (see our sad faces on the ferry from Sfkakia to Loutro) ...

... but we will rectify that on a future trip.

Getting There

While the company name implies just swimming, it was a bit of a travel trek to get there. Zara had the true multi-leg journey, starting Thursday afternoon from Ottawa to London via Toronto, staying overnight with us in London Friday, before the three of us flew to Chania, arriving there late on Saturday night. We grabbed an Airbnb in the heart of the old town, really just to sleep, but Maia and I got a little taste of this city while Zara tried to sleep off the jetlag on Sunday morning...

... before we had to catch an 11am taxi for the almost 90 minute drive across the island to the port of Sfakia, where we caught the ~20 minute ferry over to Loutro:

Our hotel on the hill (left) and view of the town at night (right). Click to enlarge photos.

Our official start time for the week wasn't until 5pm on Sunday evening, so we had enough time to settle into our hotel, grab a great lunch and walk around the cute little town - essentially just restaurants, a few stores, small beaches packed tightly with lounger chairs and umbrellas, and various lodging establishments. Our hotel for the week was the Hotel Porto Loutro II / On the Hill (see above and below) - a quaint, very clean and well-run family establishment with a great view (and even better food on their beautiful patio restaurant)!

View of the harbour and sea from my hotel room balcony

The Swims

While Swimtrek has some shorter duration holidays, we chose one of (I think) their more standard lengths - five full days of swimming Monday through Friday, with a brief intro on Sunday and a brief closing swim on the final Saturday morning.

Sunday evening was a very relaxed introductory meeting followed by a simple ~250 meter triangular swim off the beach in the center of this town. A few of us went around a couple more times, but this swim was for the guides to get a sense of each of our abilities and to finalize the three swim groups. While everyone was asked to put in an estimated swim time for a kilometer, this swim gave the guides a real-life view of our strokes. There were 15 of us on the trip - a couple of triathletes from the UK (a Brit and a South African living in the UK), one woman from the USA, us three Canadians, and then the rest of the group from Australia. It was a great, gregarious and very welcoming cadre of people. Our groups were split by speed with and given caps to identify us (Pink, Orange, Yellow). Following the swim, we all got a chance to start getting to know each other more with a group dinner on the beautiful hotel patio restaurant overlooking the Loutro harbor (this was our breakfast spot everyday):

First night group dinner on Hotel Loutro patio (photo courtesy of swimmer Jess)

The smiles continued all around on Monday morning, leaving the harbor at a very leisurely 10am or so ...

Maia and Zara ready to jump on the main boat (L); Me happy as we cruise (R)

... with two swims planned for the day, the morning one only slightly longer (~2km) than the afternoon one (~1500M). Though my ancient iPhoneSE really doesn't do the beauty of the waters justice, I couldn't stop myself from trying to capture it in both videos and pictures:

Pictures and videos can't really capture the varied blues, greens and scenes of the sea

The guides - Eoin, Georgia and Grace - emphasized safety, staying with our group, taking it slowly on Day 1 and, above all, to have fun enjoying the waters.

I think this group took the guides' guidance of having fun to the extreme. The first evidence this was going to be a fun group was when the boat captain told us we could enter the water by jumping off the roof. Though my family featured heavily in the 'early adopters' of this approach ...

Not the quickest of coordinated group entries!

.. many people did this at least once. One of the Aussies, John, in particular made some spectacular cannonball entries (which I learned they call "bombies" Down Under) and can-openers, sometimes with such a splash that the captain expressed some regret at having offered this option to us. Others, like Maia, also took time to work on their form ...

... with those of us on the boat enthusiastically doling out perfect 10 scores!

Our day on Monday had us come back to Loutro between the swims, allowing us time to rest, grab lunch on our own and then head back out for our shorter afternoon swim. While many of us wore various fitness watches to track our distances, I think I was spending so much time diving under the water to view scenes like these ...

Photos courtesy of Emily

... and cruising fairly slowly, that I never really got accurate distance readings until Friday, when I strapped my watch to my goggles strap so the watch was at the top of the back of my head ... and spent less time underwater ... though not zero time underwater. I figure I was swimming about 3,500 to 4,000 meters per day.

Me underwater with watch on my head (photo courtesy of Emily)

The age range was wide - from 20-somethings to 70-somethings - but throughout the entire week our swims were punctuated with whoops and delighted shouts to alert the others to:

Sea life - One of the speedy triathletes had an uncanny knack for motoring along at high speed and managing to pick out lionfish stuck into all sorts of nooks and crannies of the rocks. I still don't know how she did this as I would have to pause and look, look, look to see what she had zoomed over and picked out. While the aquatic life was not abundant, anytime there was anything, someone in the group was alerting the others.

Caves - I still don't know why we all delighted in these so much ... but everyone did. We'd see anything that looked like an indentation in the cliffs and head in, pop our heads up and goggles off, smile and often laugh. Everyone found their inner child and marveled at the variations in rocks, in rock surfaces, in the underwater view. One of the coolest parts of the caves was re-entering the sunlit waters from the dark haunts of the caverns ... swimming through different shades of ever-changing blues.

Caving (thanks to Grace, Eoin, Emily and LA)

After Monday, the rest of the week followed the same pattern:

• Leisurely breakfast on the hotel patio

• Depart around 9:30am/10am for our morning swim

• Slide into a cove somewhere for an excellent meal.

• R & R until about 2:30pm/3:00pm when we'd head out for our afternoon swim

The only exception was Wednesday, when we just did a longer morning swim and had the afternoon off - some people relaxed, some swam more, and I'm sure the triathletes did some kind of crazy trail running! On a few of the nights we had group dinners and on the final night we had a reflective celebration of the week gone by.

Group as "spirit dogs" and our guides with Zara (Georgia, Zara, Grace, Eoin) on Friday night

The Food

I had been to Greece back in 2015 (though Athens, Milos and Santorini) so I knew the food was bound to be good, but the flavours, freshness and variety were next level. I think I ate better (both in terms of quality and taste) than just about any other weeklong vacation in my life:

A small sampling of the fantastic meals and locally produced foodstuff

.... with every meal in an idyllic setting:

Lunch spot on Thursday at a taverna on the beach

Extracurricular

I didn't take as much advantage of the hiking trails nearby as some others did. I think the triathletes ran every morning before breakfast; I know that Maia and the guides did some crazy, scary trail runs along the mountainsides on two mornings and the guides had actually run the seemingly pure vertical cliffs that surround the harbor before we arrived. I did get out on Tuesday morning with Maia for a short 3KM walk ...

... and then did 5KM solo walk along a different portion of the E4 trail on Thursday morning before breakfast:

In Summary, the smiles say it all on Saturday morning as we got ready to depart: an incredibly excellent week of family, swimming, food and new friends was had by all: