stand (n.): 1. a final defensive effort. 2. a cessation of motion; halt or stop. 3. the place in which a person or thing stands; station.
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It took some effort and the help of a friend to find the name of that ship. For the locals it’s just “The Shipwreck”. A little digging around the net revealed that "GEMAR I" made its last stand against the raging sea almost 30 years ago, lost that last battle and that rocky Karpathian beach became its last station.
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…that wasn’t the last station on our trip to Karpathos Island, but it sure was our longest so far and one of the the most adventurous. Having undertaken the project of recording all of Greece’s shipwrecks before they rust or sink to oblivion we chose Karpathos for our summer destination and surely enough the sight of that ship was our first welcome since it’s located right outside the airport. Getting there was not an easy task though. The fact that there are no close-up photos of that ship seemed suspicious to us in the first place and we soon understood why: it was resting in a military area, guarded and well fenced and all signs on the fence made perfectly clear that photography was prohibited.

We spent the next few days counting people in high positions we knew that could bail us out in the highly possible case we were arrested. We came up with zero connections... The conclusion was “S#%t, there’s no way we can do it” and the decision was “Let’s do it anyway”! The location indicated that it would be best to capture it at sunrise which meant taking the forbidden (and tricky cause it was rocky and full of thick thorny bushes) trek right in the middle of the night, carrying huge bags like smugglers and proudly announcing our position with our flashlights. Way too risky both for our bones and our impeccable criminal records! The only alternative was to visit the place on the previous afternoon, carrying our sleeping bags so that we could spend the night there and be there to capture the first light and that’s what we did.

When we got there we realized there is a reason that ship had stranded on that particular beach: it was too damn windy. Sea spray was flying all around and it seriously narrowed down our choices of composition (trust me; you don’t want to shoot against water spray). Shooting startrails was a good way to pass the long hours but it ensured that our tripods and cameras were covered in brine. Anyway we had a pretty turbulent and very windy night (when we returned to our room the next morning the sudden absence of the howling of the wind made me think I turned deaf for a second), but at least we were there to capture the first light touching the wreck and we later managed to return to our car sleepless, dizzy, salty and pickled but at least with no confrontation with the local authorities.