The morning boats from Plakias to Preveli Beach cut a forty-minute arc around Cape Korakas, a limestone headland that divides Rethymno's southern coast into a series of sheltered coves invisible from the road. Until 1986, when a landslide buried the final kilometer of the coastal footpath, Preveli's palm-lined estuary could be reached only by sea or by descending four hundred stone steps from the monastery plateau above. The boat route from Plakias restored that maritime tradition, and today a handful of wooden kaïkia and fiberglass water taxis depart the harbor between nine and one, their schedules aligned with the monastery's opening hours and the tide's retreat from the river mouth. Preveli Beach occupies the mouth of the Kourtaliotiko Gorge, where the Megalopotamos River exits a twelve-kilometer limestone canyon and empties into the Libyan Sea. The estuary supports the only natural Theophrastus palm forest in Crete—a grove of eight hundred wild date palms that survived the Minoan collapse, Byzantine woodcutting, and the 1941 Allied evacuation. The monastery above, Moni Preveli, served as a resistance stronghold during the German occupation; its abbot sheltered two thousand British and Australian soldiers in the gorge until Royal Navy submarines extracted them from the beach in May and June of that year. The monks maintained a semaphore station on the cliffs to signal incoming vessels, and the landing site is still marked by a bronze plaque bolted to the eastern headland. The beach itself is a fifty-meter crescent of coarse sand and polished river stone, framed on three sides by cliffs that rise a hundred meters and shade the shore until mid-morning. The palm grove begins where the river slows and braids into shallow channels, its canopy extending two hundred meters inland before the gorge narrows and the oleander takes over. In summer the estuary water is thigh-deep and body-warm, safe for wading; in spring the runoff from the Kourtaliotiko can swell to waist height and the current becomes unswimmable. The monastery charges a conservation fee of 2.5 EUR for access to the beach path and gorge trail, collected at a kiosk near the top of the descent. That entrance also admits visitors to the monastery's ecclesiastical museum, a two-room collection of resistance photographs, Ottoman-era liturgical silver, and a seventeenth-century icon of the Virgin attributed to the Cretan School. Boat departures from Plakias cluster in the late morning, when the offshore wind has not yet risen and the sea remains glassy. Return crossings run from mid-afternoon until six, coordinated with the monastery's afternoon closure. The crossing itself takes thirty to forty minutes depending on swell and the number of intermediate stops at Damnoni and Ammoudi coves. Most operators offer a round-trip ticket with flexible return, allowing three to four hours ashore—enough time to descend to the beach, wade the estuary, and complete the short loop trail through the lower palm grove before the afternoon heat sets in.