Photo: View of "Sherpa" docked at Kemer Marina, our home for the winter

By mid-November, it began to get a bit chilly, especially at night, and we were constantly being asked where we were going to "over-winter" the boat (a term new to us). We had naively assumed that we would just keep sailing. But, as it turns out, the Med ain't the Caribbean! Although winters are fairly mild along the southern coast of Turkey, winter storms with gale-force winds are not uncommon.

So... the boat has been docked here at Kemer Marina for almost the past five months. As the photo shows, the view from our boat is spectacular, with a backdrop that includes both palm trees and snow-capped mountains. Quite a few Europeans (Brits, Germans, Swiss, Scandinavians, Dutch, Italians, and French) and a very few Americans are living here aboard their boats, many of whom have been returning to this marina every winter for years. They're all experienced yachters (far more so than we), several have completed circumnavigations, and all are ready to share their sailing stories and proffer advice. Many of the sailors are retired engineers of one sort of another, but we also have a veterinarian, a diplomat, ex-military, school principal, and so on. Fortunately for us, the lingua franca here is English since all the Europeans, except for one lone couple from East Germany, are fluent English speakers.

From the time we arrived, everybody was very welcoming, and it took us no time to become involved in the many activities here -- including weekly hikes into the nearby mountains, tennis tournaments, line-dancing, game nights (usually featuring a rowdy domino game called Mexican Train), movie nights, and ping pong. To help everybody keep track of what's going on, there's a Kemer "net" for cruisers at 8:30 a.m., where we tune in to Channel 69 on our VHF radios and the net coordinator gives a weather report and lists the day's activities. We've also found a British couple who enjoys playing Scrabble (but we had to make a copy of our two-letter word list for them, as they thought we were cheating!).

The marina has a cozy "clubhouse" for the live-aboard community with a restaurant and bar, and a wood-burning fireplace where the cruisers gather each evening for a convivial happy hour. On cold or blustery days when everybody's been cooped up on their own boats all day, this get-together is particularly welcome. There's also a surprisingly well-stocked library, with books organized both by language and alphabetically by author!

The marina's office staff are most helpful -- they're always happy to make phone calls in Turkish on our behalf, reserve concert tickets, arrange transportation to town or the airport, send faxes, recommend a dentist, and so on. And despite how few Americans are here, the marina served up a traditional Thanksgiving dinner with roast turkey and all the fixin's! That morning several of us trooped into the nearby wooded hillside to collect wild flowers, boughs of holly, and colorful leaves to make festive table decorations. No holiday of any nationality (or any birthday) goes uncelebrated!

The same weekend, an American couple who had sold their boat after living on it for 17 years and were moving back to San Diego threw a farewell party at their rented apartment. Their stated goal was to empty their liquor cabinet, so it was quite a party! Everybody brought food to share, and Art christened our oven by baking a yummy corn pudding.

Kemer itself is a small tourist town about midway along the southern coast of Turkey. In winter it's very quiet, but in summer it attracts hordes of sun-worshipping vacationers from across Europe and (in recent years) Russia. Shops geared to tourists tout prices in euros, sport multilingual signs, and shopkeepers speak at least a smattering of English, German, and Russian. There's a Club Med complex with a long sandy beach that is off-limits to nonguests, as well as an odd little nomad village on a promontory overlooking the marina, where a few people from a once-nomadic Turkoman tribe still live with their sheep, goats, and chickens, and serve tea to visitors. Another attraction is an aerial cable car ride to the top of snow-capped Mount Tahtali, the tallest peak in the area at 7,800 feet.

We can easily walk from the marina to trails in the nearby mountains, or bike or take a dolmus (local mini-bus) to numerous trailheads that are a bit further afield. One popular hike ends at a trout farm restaurant, which serves up delicious baked trout with a nice selection of mezes. Like most Turkish towns, Kemer has a large weekly market to which the local farmers bring their fresh fruits and vegetables, yogurt, cheese, eggs, nuts, spices, and honey. Shrimp and fresh fish (sardines, sea bass, tuna, and many types of fish that we don't recognize) are also available. On the perimeter of the market, merchants display a potpourri of inexpensive hardware (pots and pans, hand-carved wooden kitchen utensils, hand-forged tools, etc.).

We've enjoyed watching first the figs, then the olives, next the pomegranates, and finally (in December) the grapefruits, lemons, and oranges ripening on the trees around town. Suddenly there's an abundant display of the newly ripened fruits at the Monday market -- and for unbelievably low prices! We're currently paying 1 lira, or about 60 cents, for a kilo (2.2 pounds) of ever-so-sweet seedless oranges. The only item of produce that disappoints us is the corn on the cob -- we've never found anything resembling sweet corn. Corn roasted over coals is a popular street food that is sold everywhere, but we find it inedible (like feed corn).

One reason, among many, for the popularity of Kemer Marina as a winter haven for live-aboards is its proximity (about 40 minutes by car) to Antalya, a much larger city with an international airport, more shopping options (even an orange-motif'ed Home Depot-type store), weekly symphony concerts (tickets cost 10 Turkish lira, or about $6), and a museum with a wonderful collection of statuary, including Roman sculpture and other artifacts excavated at nearby archaeological sites.

Antalya also has a picturesque Kaleici, or "old town" area, that is entered through Hadrian's Gate, a majestic arched gateway built in AD 130 to honor the visit of the Roman emperor Hadrian. There's a small, enclosed harbor filled with a jumble of colorful fishing boats and trip boats (alas, no room for private sailboats), as well as a labyrinth of pedestrian-only cobblestone streets with little restaurants, boutique hotels, and pensions -- many housed in converted Ottoman houses. We stayed overnight at one such hotel, the Otantik, the night before we were to fly back to the States the following morning, and were very pleased to be upgraded to the posh "deluxe suite" with a jacuzzi.

Meanwhile, although it does get chilly here in the winter months, especially once the sun goes down each evening, we've managed to stay quite comfortable on the boat, thanks to warm sleeping bags and a small electric heater. But we also discovered that our boat, which seemed like quite a perfect size while we were out sailing, suddenly became much smaller when we were cooped up in it in trying weather. In any case, we didn't actually spend the entire winter here. We traveled for a month in Egypt and Jordan (see separate blog postings), and flew back to the States in February for a three-week whirlwind visit with family and friends -- and to help celebrate my Mom's 95th birthday.

As I write this in mid-March, we've just had our first "picnic" lunch of the year in the cockpit. And hiking in the mountains this past Sunday, we saw purple irises along the trail, little white daisies dotting the meadows, and almond trees in full blossom -- none of which were in evidence the previous weekend.

Looking ahead, we're hoping that the weather will be favorable and that we'll be ready to set sail from here by the first of April. We plan to sail westward (revisiting the lovely "Turquoise Riviera" coastline that we sailed last fall) and then up the Aegean coast of Turkey -- perhaps as far as Istanbul and the Black Sea. That would put us in a good position to sail downwind through the Sporades and Dodecanese islands of Greece later in the summer.

Sailors' itineraries are always a bit fluid, but ours is especially so since we're waiting to see how Turkey's new visa regulations will be implemented. Until now, we've been able to renew our 90-day visas simply by taking a short ferry ride to a nearby Greek island and then returning to Turkey the same day. (While in Greece, many cruisers like to stock up on bacon, pork chops, and wine since these items are either hard to find or quite expensive in Muslim Turkey.) Under the new rules that took effect in February, we would have to wait 90 days before we could re-enter the country. We've heard that visa extensions (of up to 9 months) will be made available to boat owners who want to continue cruising for longer periods in Turkey. But so far nobody, even the immigration authorities here, seem to know what the procedure is for obtaining this extension.

Just as I was ready to post this article, something occurred that perfectly exemplifies why we love it here at Kemer Marina. Although the water is still a bit chilly (60 degrees, compared to 80+ degrees in August), Art was diving around the boat with a mask and snorkel, attempting to clean the prop and waterline of algae and accumulated gunk. As he was climbing up the boarding ladder to get back onto the boat, he coughed ... and lost his dentures in the drink!!! At first we weren't too concerned since where we're docked, the water is about 10' deep and we can usually see the sea bottom perfectly clearly. But of course this day the water was cloudy because the wind had stirred it up a bit. A Brit with a boat on our dock immediately offered the use of his "diving hookah," a low-tech Scuba-type apparatus for breathing underwater. It consists of a 12-volt generator and air pump with a long, flexible plastic hose and respirator. (Having tried it out, Art is now anxious to buy or make one!) Then a German on the next dock gave Art his wetsuit, which no longer fit him. For two days running, Art took short dives next to the boat looking in vain for his teeth. (Although he came out of the water shivering, at least his teeth weren't chattering - haha!) Finally on the third morning the water had cleared, and an Italian boater with a full-body wetsuit, including headgear, offered to swim over and take a look. On his first dive he spotted the missing dentures, and on his next dive brought them up - eureka! Art was soon looking like himself again, with a huge smile on his face. And within minutes, the entire marina erupted in spontaneous clapping and cheers. It's that kind of place.