Early the next morning Bob swam ashore and released the line from the tree and we set off. We intended to go to Skopea Limani, which we remembered from charter holidays in the early 90s as an enclosed bay with myriad islands and sheltered anchorages. These anchorages, going by such evocative names such as 'wall bay', 'ruin bay', 'Tomb bay', 'deep bay' and 'Cleopatra's bay' were isolated, peaceful spots with clear blue water, goats grazing amid the marquis and the occasional primitive restaurant ashore.
The first 20 miles or so was along the coast with a lee shore a mile or so to port and nothing to starboard until you got to North Africa. As a result, and despite the lack of wind, there was a nice rolling 1½ metre swell hitting us beam on and setting Birvidik's mast swinging like a pendulum. This was sufficient to get us both a bit ratty. How soft we've become. We conveniently forget how we spent 8 weeks coming down through Biscay and along the West coasts of Spain and Portugal with a constant 3-5 metre swell on the beam.
There was virtually no wind and so the sails had little steadying effect. Things improved somewhat when we rounded the cape and set off up towards Skopea Limani, putting the swell on the stern.
The entrance into the bay is through a narrow channel between two islands, which we pottered through under motor, with all sail set. We intended to sail gently across to Wall Bay and anchor there for the night, soaking up the atmosphere and perhaps going ashore for a cheap rustic meal at the beach restaurant. We also managed to dismiss from our minds the fact that the last time we did this all four on board were laid up with gutrot for two days afterwards.
The channel was about 100 metres long and 20 metres wide. We left a smooth sea with a low swell and no wind. We came out the other end to a force 7 wind on the beam which promptly laid us down on our side. Heaped seas chopped against the boat and spray and spume streaked across the sea and lashed into the cockpit. Where the hell did that lot come from?
We rapidly reefed our sails and took stock. It seemed that there was a local topographic effect funnelling the wind between the mountains and into the bay. Our intended anchorages were taking the brunt of this. The wind was screaming out of them and getting to them would have been difficult enough, let alone trying to anchor and run a line ashore. Attempting to do so would most likely have ended up with Bob having a crash lesson in paragliding in the dinghy. We turned and ran north, downwind under genoa alone. Even then we were doing 7 knots.
Our reasoning, such as it was, went along the lines of the wind strength easing as it spread out in the bay, and our then anchoring in somewhere like Tomb Bay, which should be sheltered from the SW.
Well, we were sort of right. The wind did ease, but it slavishly followed the contours of the land and so wherever you went, at whichever point you tried to anchor and line ashore, it was beam on. On top of which it was busy. Fiendishly busy.
Since we'd left the Ionian it had become noticeable how fewer the boats became. This became even more pronounced the further east we went. Right up to Eckincek. This was obviously why - all the boats were in Skopea Limani. After trying five different anchorages, all of which were jam-packed with Gulets, gin palaces, speedboats and yachts, we did manage to squeeze into a space in Boynuz Buku between two gulets. We dropped the hook and ran a line ashore, but weren't very happy with it.
All the bays here are very deep until you get right up close to the shore. As a result you have to drop your anchor in 15 to 20 metres of water. The rule of thumb for anchoring is that you let out chain equal to 3 to 5 times the depth of water, in order to ensure a nearly horizontal pull on the anchor to keep it from dragging. That would, by the rules, have required letting out 60 - 80 metres of chain. We had dropped anchor about 20 metres from the shore. Any deeper than that and we'd have been dropping in 50 metres of water.
So, we ended up with a line ashore and a scope of less than twice the depth of water. Bob wouldn't have minded if he'd been able to dive and see if the anchor had bitten, but the water was too murky and he's a bit out of practice to free dive to 20 metres. We sat there for a bit, but couldn't relax and so pulled up the anchor, only to find that it had bitten beautifully in sand and mud.
We decided to go to Goceck at the northern head of the bay. The pilot book says that this has good anchoring in about 8 metres on mud and sand. We remembered it from the charter holidays as a charming little village with a ramshackle quay and pontoon and a few local bars and restaurants. So off we went, weaving our way between the ever increasing numbers of boats, augmented by swarms of small speedboats and RIBs, hacking in all directions at high speed, almost all of them showing no understanding of the collision regulations whatsoever. It was bedlam.
The anchorage doesn't exist any more. There's a fuelling berth in the middle and pontoons around the outside with notices saying 'Private - piss off' in eight different languages. Anywhere not occupied by the aforementioned has been buoyed off with similar notices. The ramshackle little quay is now a sodding great marina jammed to the gunwales with charter boats (and we'd hit changeover day).
This was getting beyond a joke. Under other circumstances we might have retained our usual sanguine attitude but we were now getting seriously pissed off, possibly because we'd built up our expectations for this area. We'd started at 6:30 in the morning. It was now 6:30 at night and we were tired and hungry so we decided to take our ball back and go off in a sulk. We executed a 180 degree turn and headed the 12 miles across the top of the bay to Fethiye.
By this time the wind had dropped to almost nothing. The swell, however, came back with a vengeance and started throwing the boat from side to side and its contents all over the place. Bob was getting fed up with it, but Liz had a complete sense of humour failure. Bob tried to jolly her out of it and had just got to the point where he thought he'd succeeded when a particularly badly timed swell threw the boat violently on one side then the other, and an ominous crashing sound came from the saloon.
At Liz's retirement do, one of the surgeons remarked in his speech that he'd never seen her in a bad mood. There was general agreement with this sentiment. Reconcile that with the following verbatim, if slightly bowdlerised, quotation:
"Right! That's it! I've had enough. We've just rolled so much that the f-ing eggs have just f-ing flown from a place they've never f-ing moved from before and smashed all over the f-ing carpet!"
Bob was shocked. And amused, but his laughter was probably not the most politic of responses under the circumstances.
Never mind. By 8:00 that night we were snugly anchored in a bay off Fethiye and, with Bob having fed Liz a vodka and soda, a sense of perspective slowly returned.
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Apart from the boating bureaucracy, moving on to a new country involves a number of other little jobs - new sim cards for the phones, internet access that sort of thing. Within the EU the phone isn't too much of a problem - you just buy a local sim card and stick it in your existing phone. You can do this in Turkey, but after about a fortnight you suddenly get cut off without warning and neither threats nor bribery will get you reconnected. Local political influence might help, but we're a bit short on that. No-one at the shop tells you about this, of courswe, and they'll gladly sell you the sim card. Luckily, we had found out about it earlier over the yottie grapevine. Apparently the government is concerned that it might be losing out on some revenue from imported phones. That's guaranteed to concentrate their minds.
There is much less English spoken in Turkey than we were used to in Greece, and it's not too easy trying to have accurate technical and fiscal discussions in pidgin. In the end we bought two new cheapy Nokia phones and local sim cards with translation services provided by a waiter drafted in from the café next door.
The internet posed more of a problem. We had been spoiled with our Vodafone mobile phone network connection to the laptop in Greece and wanted to get the same here. It's a very useful and convenient getting forecasts and e-mails on demand from the boat. This worked even all the way through the Greek islands.
Ooh but we're spoilt. There was a time when forecasts consisted of a static-scrambled stream of fractured English in an impenetrable accent, occasionally enhanced by the technological miracle of a weatherfax, this latter being a dirty grey sheet of A4 with some slightly dirtier greyer smudges on it. Some yachtsmen proclaimed that they could divine the forthcoming weather for up to 3 days from this rune. Personally we reckoned we used to have as much luck from consulting pine cones and strands of seaweed, augmented occasionally by inspecting the entrails of a recently slaughtered chicken or goat, but that did tend to make a mess of the decks and block up the scuppers.
One chap in the Turkcell shop was very helpful. We'd found a leaflet about a local USB internet connection. When we showed it to him he was most enthusiastic, going on in raptures about how fast it was, how many gigabytes we could get, how much they would cost and how we could get more. "Great" we said, "We'll take it".
He stopped mid flow. "Oh no" he replied "is finished. All finished. In all Marmaris all finished." We weren't sure if 'all finished' meant permanently, given the Turkish authorities rather ambivalent attitude to the internet, or whether it meant that they were temporarily unavailable and more would be coming in.
We decided to try again in a few days in Fethiye.
On the way from Marmaris to Eckincek, you pass Karaagac Limani a large bay which has been appropriated by the Turkish military and is strictly off limits. On the seaward border of this is a restricted zone, although it's difficult to ascertain exactly what one may or may not do in it. We decided to chance going through the restricted zone in order to avoid a long detour.
About halfway across we heard the characteristic 'thukka thukka thukka' of a rotor blade. Looking landward we saw the sinister shape of a large military helicopter coming straight toward us at a height of about 20 metres. Our mast is 12 metres high. Feeling as though we were inhabiting a scene from Apocalypse Now, Bob turned up the volume on the VHF and waited. As it came closer (with no communication from the VHF) it suddenly struck us that we had full sail up. Even if he missed the mast, at that height the downdraft would lay us over on our side. We held our collective breath. With about 50 metres to go he veered off to port and disappeared into the distance.
Relieved, we looked back to the military zone only to see a submarine break surface about ½ mile away, pointing toward us from the look of the conning tower. By this time we were quite looking forward to our close encounter but were disappointed as it just kept station for a while and then dived again.
Eckincek remained the beautiful, peaceful spot we remembered from charter holidays nearly 20 years ago. The water was crystal clear and the shores wooded right down to the water's edge. The anchorages here remain very deep until very close to the edge, so we anchored in 15 metres and took a line astern to the shore to keep us at the right angle. This was only the second time we'd done this but everything seemed to go well. "Piece of piss" we thought.
Remember previous posts about hubris? See the next entry, which was intended to be a short hop to Skopea Limani, but ended up being a little longer. Provisional title - 'Lizzie gets a bit ratty'.
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This will be the last entry involving bureaucratic procedures until we have to renew our Turkish visas at the end of September/beginning of October.
Honest.
In order to clear out of Greece we had to deal with the following authorities in the right order: passport control, immigration, health, customs and finally port police to get our transit log stamped for exit to Turkey. As we wanted to leave at sparrow fart the next day, we decided to start early and at 7:30 we walked into Kos town with our documentation.
We found passport control and immigration straight away. It was easily identified by the 500 metre queue of gently baking, wilting tourists that wound its way tortuously across the sun blasted car park, snaking round rubbish bins, parked cars, coaches and fume-belching lorries. Every 15 minutes or so the queue would shuffle forwards and 2 or 3 people would step gratefully into the air conditioned office. In this time, of course another coachload would have joined the tail.
Working on the principle that the glut of potential day trippers would have cleared in a couple of hours we took ourselves off and spent a happy hour or so pottering around the castle, from where we could keep an eye on the queue. Once we'd seen that it had dwindled to the merely ludicrous we joined the end. As we approached the doors we became uncertain as to whether we were in the right place, as all those in front of us were going straight through after processing and boarding large cruise boats.
We asked a tour rep who said "Oh no - you don't want to be here - you want to be in the other office by the cafeteria." So off we went. Further enquiries at said office elicited the response that "Oh no - you don't want to be here, you want to be in the other office you've just come from". On our return, of course, another coachload of Germans had joined the end of the queue.
By now it was 11:00 and we were getting hungry and thirsty. The sign on the office door said that the office hours were 08:00 - 21:00, so we decided to have a coffee and a bite to eat and come back in about an hour. Fortified with a toastie and a fresh orange juice we returned to find that the queue had completely disappeared. We also found that the door was shut and locked.
A helpful guy from customs told us that, having just cleared all the daytrippers out, they were now all busy round the other side clearing the Turkey to Greece daytrippers in. He suggested we go and have a coffee and come back in about an hour.
An hour's stroll later found us back at immigration and the door still locked. This time we were directed down the side of the building where we found an open window. Behind this window was an office in which was a uniformed guy sitting drinking coffee and reading a newspaper. Not a day-tripper in sight.
We were just wondering about the advisability of distracting him from his labours, when a local tour rep turned up. She yelled through the window at him and he put down the racing results. On his approach, Bob explained that we wanted to clear out. "When are you leaving?" he asked. "Early tomorrow morning" we said.
"Come back at 7 p.m." he said, letting the tour rep in then shutting and locking the door in our faces.
It's fairly pointless trying to argue with a shut door so we resignedly trudged all the way back to the marina to see the port police and sort out that end of the paperwork. What naïve little optimists we were. It has to be done in the right order. No exceptions. So, we had to go back to Kos at 7 p.m. to get our passports cleared before we could clear out with health, then customs and then finally with the port police.
"Unfortunately," the charming Port Policewoman informed us, "we shut at 4 p.m."
This was getting quite Kafkaesque.
It turned out, though, that there was a Port Police office in Kos town which was open 24 hours a day, so we resigned ourselves to a lost evening and another long walk into town and back, carrying every piece of documentation we could find, which was quite a lot.
To our great surprise, our evening attempt couldn't have gone more smoothly. Smiling immigration officials cheerily stamped forms and joshed in a manly way about Bob's rucksack. Bob didn't realise when he bought it, but this is franchised merchandise of Olymbiakos football club, who are the Greek equivalent of Man U.
Apparently.
Customs and health must have also been Olymbiakos fans as we sped through there with smiles and jokes and were personally escorted to the Port Police where the same happened and we were spat out the other end after only 40 minutes with all the paperwork sorted.
No-one ever did ask us for the hard-earned receipt for the 88 cent tax either.
We left Kos early the next morning in a strengthening wind and started on a cracking sail, reaching 7 knots in a lumpy sea. Just as we were getting the hang of it and starting to really enjoy it, the wind dropped and swung round on to the nose. After that it was motorsail all the way to Marmaris.
Entry into Turkey requires flying the Q flag and then visiting the following, in the right order: Harbour master (where you obtain a transit log and pay harbour and light dues); health (where you sign an affidavit that you're not importing any unauthorised unpleasant infections); immigration and passport control (where you need to obtain visas valid for 90 days); Customs (where you list every item on the boat worth more than £2:50, along with the relevant make, model, colour, age and serial number) and finally customs patrol who, if they're particularly bored, may want to come on board and have a rummage through your knicker drawer.
This is the peculiar phenomenon of deja vue.
The fees for all of this amounted to about 130 euros. For an extra 20 euros you can pay an agent to do it all for you. This involves handing over all your papers, including passports, boat registration documents etc and not seeing them again for 24 hours. So we chose an agent linked to the marina. Then at least we know where to point the finger if Birvidik suddenly turns out to be owned by an Albanian people-trafficking ring and we get pulled up at any borders because some computer links our passports with actions by assorted terrorists, international prostitution barons, political dissidents, mafia hitmen, money launderers, Shin Bet agents, illegal immigrants and drug smugglers.
Your starter for 10 - which two of the above might have some basis in historical truth?
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