Rock-cut basins on the shoreline at Hersonissos Port still fill and empty with the tide, two thousand years after Roman engineers cut them into the limestone to hold live fish. The town was then Chersonesos, a low peninsula that served as the maritime outlet of Lyttos, a wealthy inland city that struck its own coinage. Ancient harbour moles remain, submerged roughly a metre below the surface. On a windless morning their outline is legible from the deck of any Hersonissos Speed Boat leaving the quay. Chersonesos held a bishopric in the early Christian centuries, and foundations of basilica churches survive above the modern seafront, one retaining fragments of mosaic flooring. A Roman fountain decorated with a mosaic of fishermen working from small boats was recorded near the harbour by nineteenth-century travellers and remains the town's most quoted antiquity. Fishing sustained the settlement for centuries after the classical port silted and shrank. The wooden caique, broad-beamed and slow, was the standard local hull until the 1970s, when charter tourism reached this stretch of the north coast and rebuilt Limenas Chersonisou around it. Speed then changed the geography of the coast. What a caique reached in half a day, a rigid inflatable now covers in twenty minutes, which is why Hersonissos Speed Boat Tours have become the ordinary means of reading the shoreline west of the harbour: the Anissaras headland, the chapel of Sarantaris on its spit of rock, the wave-cut caves under the cliffs. Further out lies Dia, an uninhabited island north of Heraklion, protected under Natura 2000 and grazed by kri-kri goats; underwater surveys there in the 1970s reported submerged structures on the seabed. The Cretan Sea is deep and clear, and visibility off these rocks often exceeds fifteen metres. The port itself is unromantic and working: concrete quay, fuel line, ice machine, a row of kiosks under canvas awnings. Departures share the water with sailing yachts bound for Dia and with the traditional wooden cruises that still run the old routes — the older end of the Hersonissos boat excursion trade. Nothing here is monumental. The interest lies in the meeting of an ancient anchorage and a modern fleet, and a Hersonissos Speed Boat Tour is the shortest line drawn between the two.