Or 'How our heroes spent the hottest 6 weeks of the year traipsing up and down the southern coast of Turkey looking for a winter mooring'.
After the dubious joys of wintering in Corfu, we decided to do a bit more research before choosing this winter's location. So we've travelled along the south coast of Turkey from Marmaris to Antalya checking out the marinas en route to see if they match up to our exacting standards, namely bombproof shelter, excellent facilities, helpful multilingual staff, good technical services, cheap and good accommodation for when hauled out, beautiful surroundings, lively social life, good provisioning, interesting cultural opportunities and dirt cheap. Not much to ask, is it.
In doing so we compared and contrasted Marmaris, Fethiye, Kas, Kekova, Finike, Kemer and Antalya. As usual we couldn't make our minds up and had to go back and see them all again. In the end we plumped for Finike as the best compromise and have booked in for 6 months from 1st November. If any other yotties are interested in comparative facilities and prices, leave a message and we'll get back to you.
Throughout this exercise it's been a tad warm. Afternoon temperatures have been averaging over 40 degrees in the shade, and even by 10 at night they're still up in the mid thirties. Bedclothes have been dispensed with except for a thin sheet pulled over between 04:30 and 06:00 when the temperature has, on rare occasions, been known to drop as low as 25 degrees.
This requires some adaptation, physiological, behavioural and environmental.
Physiologically we probably can cope more with the heat than before, but it doesn't feel like it, certainly when compared with the locals. Take walking through Antalya city centre, dressed in light shorts, sandals and a thin, short sleeved, loose-fitting shirt. All effort is made to keep in the shade, even though this means zig-zagging from one side of the street to the other and skulking in and out of doorways like Clouseau at his most incompetent trying to tail a suspect. Air conditioned shops (i.e. almost all of them) become strangely attractive, irrespective of the wares on offer within.
Despite all this we were drenched in sweat. Dark stains spread over shirts, armpits, backs, chests and stomachs. Shorts developed damp patches in embarrassing places. Hair became lank and slicked back. Sweat dripped off noses and earlobes and ran through sodden eyebrows into the eyes, stinging and blurring vision.
Now what are the locals like, walking, and working, under exactly the same conditions? Cool, relaxed, airy and what's more dry that's what. They stroll elegantly down the street in dresses, headscarves, shoes (and socks!), long trousers, shirts and ties, even jackets and hats. Some had vests under their shirts as well. How do they do that? Do they have a sheep dip full of antiperspirant in the front garden through which they're poked with sticks on their way out every morning? "Mehmet! Make sure uncle Ibrahim's head goes right under this time - you missed behind his ears yesterday." And compare them to us. We might as well be carrying a bell and a placard announcing 'Unclean! Tourist of dubious personal hygiene'.
Environmental changes mainly involved modifying the internal environment of the boat. Sunshades are great at cutting out the heat of the sun (hence the name), but they also drastically reduce airflow. So we had to increase ventilation.
This leads us on to a minor ripple in the pool of domestic harmony that is Birvidik.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Liz is jealous.
Of the fridge.
She considers that Bob is obsessed. Every time she turns around he's on his knees before it, gently spraying its delicate inner workings with water. "It's the heat" he says. "The poor thing can't cope - it needs help." Liz reckons it's not the only one.
Liz keeps buying fans (which she's told we don't need) but when she goes to use them they've disappeared. Then she finds them lovingly arranged around the bloody fridge! She's convinced that even if she bought a hundred fans he'd still have them all focussed on the fridge. He even sets a timer to make sure that, even if he's reading a really good book, he doesn't forget to check that the fridge is doing OK.
Bags of ice are bought and stuffed in to help it. If she's very lucky she can have a couple of lumps in her vodka and soda but she reckons that the pained expression on his face when the ice cubes are sacrificed in this way takes away from the enjoyment somewhat.
Still, it's all worth it as long as his beer is chilled.
This plethora of fans does help, especially in bed when one is left on all night in the aft cabin. This just about enables sleep and has the added benefit of stopping our sleep being disturbed by mosquitoes. The new 'Megawatto Typhoonerama' fan creates such a blast of air that any mosquito attempting a bit of vampirism either dies from exhaustion trying to fly against it to get to us or, if trying to go with the flow, ends up slamming terminally into the headboard.
Of course, the combined wattage of all these fans has meant that the wind generator and solar panel can't cope so we've had to buy a petrol generator to replace all the lost amps. If it goes on like this we'll have a carbon footprint the size of Luxembourg.
In behavioural terms, the obvious thing to do is nothing, especially in the hottest part of the day. Which is most of it. So what do Bob & Liz do during the heat of the day? Here are a few examples:
1. Climb to the heights above Fethiye to view the castle and the Lycian rock tombs.
On the way up we were befriended by Elgin who gave us a guided tour and plausible history of the region. He also showed us the Lycian 'prison' from about 3000 years ago. Well, I say 'prison' but it was really more of an oubliette. This was an interconnected series of caves and tunnels, accessed via vertical holes. Prisoners were lowered (or thrown) down one end and only pulled out the other end when they were suitably dead.
No parole there then.
The tombs were fascinating, especially as you could get right up to and inside them. Their public aspects, from the outside, were huge, impressive and elaborate structures, carved out of the rock in the form of temple frontages. They implied the continuation behind of large rooms and imposing spaces.
In reality, the business end, where the actual job of sticking leftover Lycians took place, was a tiny little hole just big enough for a couple of stiffs. 98% of effort and expenditure on image and PR and 2% on actually doing the job.
Human nature hasn't changed much in 3000 years then.
2. Go sea kayaking in Kekova wearing a thick lifejacket and a rubber skirt.
This was led by a guy currently studying for a PhD in Astrophysics. He spends all summer leading adventure holidays, kayaking, canyonning, paragliding, hot air ballooning etc, and all winter at University probing the mysteries of the cosmos.
You needed a PhD in physics to balance the kayak, especially when there are two of you in it as you have to second guess what the other one's going to do and try to counter it. We managed to get through without rolling the thing over, but it was a bit close at times. Especially when we went over a sunken city and Liz decided to lean over the side and have a really good look.
3. Climb up to the castle at Kale Koy and scramble through the ancient sarcophagi in the necropolis.
Do you see a pattern developing here?
There are so many sarcophagi on this coast that it's easy to become somewhat blasé about them, but this area is stunning. There is even a lonely sarcophagus standing in the water off the quay at Kale Koy. It must be one of the most photographed sights in Turkey.
So we didn't take one.
Now all is sorted for the winter we can enter pottering mode. We intend to wander up and down this bit of coast at our leisure and check out the sights we can go to when our prospective guests come out at the end of the summer.
Must dash - got to check on the fridge.
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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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