They found it easily enough as Hydra is the third stop on the steamer ferry from Piraeus. Now we travel by high speed hydrofoils that zap you here in just over an hour. 
 
 

Here is what poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen had to say in a 1980 Interview :

         "I guess it was from '60 to maybe '65. Hydra. The Johnstons were there. There were just a few
         foreigners there in those days. The Johnstons were central figures. They were older. They
         were doing what we all wanted to do which was to write and to make a living out of writing.
         They were very wonderful, colorful, hospitable people. They helped me settle in. They gave
         me a table and chair and bed and really helped me out.'

To the Johnstons, everything they experienced in Hydra was imbued with a magical quality. Here is George's description of watching his wife swim from his 1969 novel "Clean Straw For Nothing".

"Cressida was far out on the other side of the bay, breast-stroking slowly, the mask on the top of her head, searching among the grey and yellow rocks that formed one of the ox-horn tips of the cove. On the other tip that faced it there was a whitewashed shrine to St. Nicholas, hardly bigger than a privy, shaped and glistening like a frosted cake. Where Cressida swam the submerged rocks seen through the glassy water were just as detailed as the rocks above baking in the sun, there was the illusion of levitation, she floated in the clear blue air."

Portrait of the Australian artist Yiannis Wolfgang Kardamatis, painted by  Michel Le Goff 1991 in Hydra Collection of  The Art Gallery of New South Wales,  Sydney  1.5 x 1m (59 x 39.5in.)  oil and marble dust on canvas  (Hydra, 1991)  Kardamatis went to Australia as a child. He was an original member of the Sydney Group of painters during the second world war. He has lived in Hydra since the 1950''s.

see also :
John Lucas : Martin Johnston and the matter of elegy