Kale Koy to Kemer

Entering Kemer Marina

We got up in the morning around 7:30 and pushed off the dock -- Marina driving again. I was the deck-hand and the kids were securely in their bunks. We backed up beside the sunken parts of the city, sarcophagus, etc., and powered into the bay, called Kekova Roads. The wind was non-existent and we just pointed the nose towards the next point on the horizon. There were several places we could stop for the night, and we checked them all out along the way...but we just kept going because it was a beautiful day, it was still light out and none of the anchorages blew us away.

Jessie working behind the bar with Mali

Ross hanging with the many Kemer cats



So shortly before dusk we called Kemer Marina on the VHF and said we were coming in. Two guys in an inflatable came out to lead us to a nice, secure berth in a quite location in the small-ish marina. Once tucked in we learned there was a "Happy Hour" in the Navigator bar/restaraunt. Well duh...we went! We intantly felt at home...what a wonderful group of cruisers who "live" here many weeks of the year over the winter months. Americans, French, Swiss, British, Germans, Belgians and even fellow Canadians, (a couple from Toronto on their boat 3 Rivers). We learned all about Kemer Marina and what it has to offer. Best of all (Marina is writing this blog)...there is a tennis court!! We've played almost every day, Matt included. There are organized training sessions and a fun tournament on Saturdays.



Marina's favourite activity!



We've also done line dancing, played table tennis, Jessie has joined the weekly art class, there are hikes every Sunday and also Sunday movie nights. There are special events/dinners that are organized and thus, lots to keep us busy, not to mention working on boat maintenance. And Matt's mom and her partner Dave are coming on the 15th so we need to clean the boat and do laundry too!!  

Kas to Kale Koy

At 7:00 am we woke up to some strong winds pushing us ashore; Ross said he had just gotten up to do some more Facebook. The anchor didn’t set really well the night before and Marina and I were nervous, so we lifted the anchor and set off early (7:30am what’s with that!). During this procedure Ross was pretty much useless … and he admitted that he had stayed up all night chatting on Facebook so as soon as we got the anchor up we sent him off to bed.

We powered through some narrow passages with lots of reefs and rocks. We had hoped to sail but the winds were either on the nose or had disappeared completely. The coastline here has very high elevation right to the shore, so we are thinking that these are morning Katabatic winds quickly cancelled out by the seabreeze when the sun comes up.

Our original plan was to go to the marina at Finike. The wind looks like it is going to be in the teens so we were thinking that we’d want to be at a proper dock. Part-way along there is a city called Kale that has an ancient castle and is adjacent to a sunken city. We pulled into a restaurant’s quay (Hasan’s Roma) and it is so pleasant, we might stay for the night here and make it to Finike tomorrow.

Also at Kale Koy is a castle and many intact sarcophagi standing in the necropolis, though many have been broken into over the last 2,000 years. We toured the castle and looked at the many ruins (Ross quipped he is being ruined by ruins) and tombs.

Then we took the dinghy across the bay to view a sunken city that became submerged after an earthquake. We found it cool, Ross drowsy from staying up all night grumbled about it most of the way.

After running from a flock of mosquitos – haven’t seen anything like that since northern Ontario, we made it back to the boat to do some internet blogging (yay).

We had a couple of nice meals at Hassan's restaraunt - assuring us of "free" moorage for the day and night. The food was excellent and we got to know the family a bit. Had especially good fun sitting at a traditionally Turkish low table, leaving shoes outside the door.

Kalkan to Kas

Anyway, the beach beckons again ….. and the sound of jack-hammers is not particularly conducive to sleep so off we go.  The wind was about 15 knots on the nose and there was a bunch of high cloud so the beach looked doubtful. The kids and Marina were down below working on school and I pulled out the genoa and sailed up the bay. At the time of decision (we were approaching an island and we needed to go either left or right) we thought … let’s go take a look. This took us around the point, we tucked in behind a rock promontory and anchored. The boat was sitting funny for a while – wind pointing at the stern – but it finally settled down, Marina took off to the beach with the kids while I stayed on board making sure everything was OK.

 The shore-break was pretty big so the kids hopped out and swam to shore while Marina patrolled up the beach in the dinghy. After about 15 minutes she came back and got me off of Tara, we took the dinghy anchor, and set it about 4 waves out from the beach, and swam ashore. The sand on this 7 mile long beach is unbelievable. The first thing we did was climb up the dunes (hard work) and run down as fast as we could, again and again. The day before Marina led us through two sets of 30 deep lunges on the sand and (the old ones of us) could definitely feel the burn in our cheeks as we climbed up the dunes. Ross led out running down the sand as fast as he could – we followed … with Ross chiding us that we were running like girls … which strangely enough gets Marina’s goat more than mine. We then played in the waves for an hour or so, swam back to the dinghy, raised anchor and motored back to Tara. Taking the outboard off was a bit of a chore in the big waves but we got it onto the pushpit and sailed off towards the city of Kas. About half way we ran out of wind and put on the ‘iron genny’ again … geez, in this part of the world it’s either 25 knots or zero. We decided to anchor out in a bay on Kas in spite of a restaurant owner’s desperate attempt to lure us into his laid moorings. We listened to “The Help” after dinner (and a conference call), and bedded down for the night – all except for Ross who stayed chatting to Hayden, Adam, Emma, Jessica, Stephan, and Rachel on Facebook. I woke at 3:00 am and asked him to go to bed.

Yassica Adalari to Kalkan

The next morning we got up and out early – we were off by 8:00am – the earliest yet, there was no wind so we powered towards our destination of Kalkan (sounds like the dog-food). Along the way there is a 7 mile long beach that we passed by and Ross pleaded with us to stop and take a look. Since we left so early it was only noon and we just one hour to our destination so we said OK. We anchored, dropped him in the dinghy and let him go in and check the beach.  He came back raving about the fine sand and the size of the dunes. We all piled in the dinghy and went ashore. 

The shore break was a bit worrying (remember the scene from ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 3’ where the boat is rolled over by the breaking waves onshore) but we made it through. The beach is some 7 miles long at the head of a river. The Pilot book warns of very confused seas caused by it being so shallow – it was definitely correct about that. Staying on Tara was an invitation to seasickness.  When we arrived on the beach we were the only people for as far as the eye could see in both directions.

We spent the next hour running on the beach, playing in the waves and body surfing. Not bad for November the 7^th. Around 2pm we were getting hungry and we saw a scooter driving down the beach so we piled in the dinghy and zoomed out of there – not wanting to get into any trouble. It turned out to be an old guy out for a scooter ride on the beach. We got back to the boat and quickly pulled up the anchor to get out of the roley-poley washing-machine action and powered into Kalkan.

Kalkan is a nice little town that appears to be growing quickly. Unfortunately for us, there is a lot of digging happening right now. At the marina quay they’re digging up the quay to put in metered water and power. Marina water and power charges are 0.45 Euros per kilowatt hour – BC Hydro charges 6 cents, and water is $5 Euros per cubic meter, West Vancouver charges us between $0.67 and $1.11 – so you can see why they meter it. The more you use, the more you pay. Not a bad approach if you ask me. Kalkan is also building a new highway – looks like an Autobahn around the town. It will probably bring more development, more money and more prosperity, though sometimes it would be nice to leave parts of smaller towns alone. It would be like if they put a bridge from the mainland to Sidney over top of Galiano. It would be great for access and it would be great for property values – but it would also force development in areas that are not economic to develop today. I think we should increase density in already populated areas and leave the wilderness be (easy for me to say as we already have got our little piece of developed wilderness at Parker Island)

Tomb-Bay to Gocek to Yassica Adalari (about 5 miles total)

In the morning at Tomb Bay we got up early, untied our stern line from the bollard ashore and lifted anchor. We wanted to visit Gocek to get some provisions. We anchored out and took the dinghy in. We had breakfast, the ladies each had omelettes, Ross and I opted for something called a ‘Turkish Breakfast’ that turned out to be lots of bread, a bowl of strawberry syrupy/jam, a bowl of honey, a couple of fried eggs, a plate of sliced fried sausages, and a plate of sliced tomato and cucumber. Quite a breakfast indeed. The honey here is outstanding …. It seems more flavourful than what we get at home … more research is required as to how and why this might be the case.

After provisioning, buying some boat parts, groceries and filling up with fuel, we headed about 1.5 miles to the small archipelago of Yassica Adalari – which looks beautiful from the aerial photo, but the sand bar is more like a ‘rock bar’. We had a swim, Ross explored the area, and settled in for the night. We spent a few hours listening to ‘The Help’ and enjoying the book immensely. 

Dalyan to Tomb Bay

We got up around 8 and prepped to leave. Woke the kids up and they went on-deck to get the boat off the dock. I needed to do some work (yay … I have some work to do) so I stayed below and worked on my computer while Marina and her crew cast off the dock – so Marina has successfully taken the boat in and out of a dock – great to have another competent skipper aboard. Marina is unique among most sailing wives …. She actually runs the boat as skipper a big percentage of the time. I don’t understand why more women don’t do it … it certainly lightens the load – plus with the number of overweight type-A boaters, you think it would just be a prudent safety precaution – and cheaper than a portable defibrillator.

We wanted to power for an hour so we could charge the freezer (we have an engine driven fridge and a battery driven fridge). We powered through the river estuary where there was wind, and I came up after work around 11:30 and we thought let’s try sailing. The wind was very light from behind so we thought – let’s try the spinnaker. You might recall as part of our negotiations with Kremik we received a few goodies for them tying up the boat for so long, and the spinnaker was one of these. We rigged the spinnaker for the first time and put it up and we had a very nice couple of hours going downwind with it up.

Unfortunately, we are short one snatch block so we can only put the spinnaker up on one side for now … but we’ve ordered one that will hopefully arrive with Granny Sharon so we can use the spinnaker pole and head down-wind with more confidence in our spinnaker flying abilities.





The archipelago of Fethiye Korfezi looks remarkably like the Gulf Islands in BC. There are trees, lots of small islands, lots of indents in the coast, and fairly deep water. It’s more wilderness cruising than we have done in Europe so far. There wasn’t much wind so after we took the spinnaker down and powered into Tomb Bay.  In the smaller bays you often take a line to shore – this does two things: it provides room for many more boats when it is busy; and it offers more safety if it does blow hard with two points connected to the boat rather than one. The Turks are serious about the environment here too. If you empty out your head into the bay and are caught -- $8,000 fine. They are trying to pass a law requiring all yachts to store their grey water (sink and shower water) and dispose of it on-shore. While we’re still goofing around trying to figure out whether our black water (you know the stuff that comes out of the toilet) is bad they’re going the next step – trying to reduce the damage caused by soaps in the environment.

I’d guess that 20 years from now we’ll wise up to some of this stuff too. When we bought Tara we had two holding tanks installed and we use them all the time. For all the boaters out there that don’t use their holding tanks, consider what it is like for the rest of us that want to swim or fish in the harbour you’re pooping in. The people we met from Victoria told a story about cruising to Princess Louisa inlet where tree branches hang into the water. And in the morning when the tide went out those tree branches were covered with toilet paper .. how yucky is that to have been swimming in the day before?

Pidgeonhole Tombs

Tomb bay is named for its pigeon hole tombs carved into the rock face. We took the dinghy ashore and explored several tombs, some of the traditional Greco-column type, and others that were the pigeon hole type. We didn’t see any remains but we were respectful of the work that was done to carve these into the rock. After the first tomb the kids went back to the dinghy and Marina and I carried on exploring three more sets of tombs in the rock face.

 The amount of work and planning that must have gone into choosing the sites, designing the tombs and then creating them is amazing. I thought that there might be some type of cement-type product used, Marina thinks it was just chiseled out of the rock – more research required – but regardless, we were a couple hundred feet up a goat path that makes the Grouse Grind seem easy – and lugging anything up there would be a chore. 

My Marina in Caunos – the Kids are Exposed to Fine Dining

Our experience so far is that we have either no wind or lots of wind, not much in between. Here we are on November 2^nd powering from Marmaris to Caunos. We left Marmaris around noon. It took a while to pay (this is a BIG marina and their cash control is you get the invoice from one person and then go pay at the cashier, bring the receipt back, and then are given clearance. Sounds cumbersome but if you saw the 6 inch high stacks of 50 Euro notes in their cash area, you’d appreciate they’re operating with tens of thousands of Euros of cash every day … a pretty good business I’d say.

As I’ve said before, a good cruising sailboat has to be a number of things including being a good powerboat. We cruise along at between 7 and 8 knots – a little faster if we want to put up with the noise. Our destination was only 20 miles away and we just throttled up and made it in a couple of hours. When we arrived we had a debate whether we anchor out or tie up at a small marina called My Marina. The bay was completely exposed to the South and deep – 20 to 30 meters, so we opted to tie up at the marina. Perhaps we were lured by “free if you eat dinner at the restaurant” pitch as well.

There was one other boat at the dock so it was a great opportunity for Marina to bring the boat into the dock. It has laid moorings (anchors on the bottom that are led by lines to the dock, so she needed to back into the slip, tie the stern lines on while Ross pulls up the laid mooring line with the boathook and attaches it to the bow (all the while being aware to not run over anything with the prop). As usual she did a great job as did her crew and we tied up securely to the dock. My Marina is a lovely place, quiet (maybe because it’s November) but immaculately manicured, with interesting buildings, very nice docks and crystal clear water. We arrived early enough for a swim and we dove off the boat into the water. While the water is getting cooler, it’s still warmer than it ever gets in English Bay or in Centre Bay Gambier Island or most certainly – Parker Island. After drying off and getting dressed we went up to the restaurant.

It was the kids’ first experience with fine dining with many waiters filling up glasses, several sets of silverware, etc. We had a couple of appetizers and a few entrees that we all shared, followed up with deserts and coffee. It was a wonderful meal and the kids behaved perfectly. I’m not sure that we want to be taking them out to this level of place on a regular basis, but it was fun to see their eyes pop out at the service and how nice the experience was.

The next day we were picked up in a small tourist boat for our trip to the city of Dalyan, the ancient city of Caunos, tombs carved in rock, and the mud-baths. We were like tourists for the first time in a while.

Jessies Blue Crab Necklace

The tour started heading past a beautiful cave (apparently if you swim there with a partner you’ll be married within a year). That didn’t appeal to Ross & Jessie or the two German guys that were on the tour with us. Next we stopped at the river estuary to see some resident sea turtles. The guide was fishing for turtle with blue crabs – and while we didn’t see a turtle we did end up buying 3 blue crabs for an appetizer for dinner that night. As we wound up the river we went through miles of estuary with bull rushes. The river wound its way with no particular mind as to its track. After a few miles of this we came to the old town of Caunos.

We disembarked our boat and went ashore to explore the ruins. Hellenistic (Greek), Roman and Byzantine and Ottoman – each successive conqueror would build their city on top of the old one.  Apparently the mantra “location, location, location” applied to real-estate thousands of years ago as it does today. We explored the ruins of a large amphitheatre, of some temples, a roman bath – pretty much all by ourselves – tourist season is definitely over.

After the ruins we got back on the boat and proceeded to the Town of Dalyan for lunch. On the way we saw on the cliff face near the town amazing tombs. Gets the imagination going. Once berthed in Dalyan, our guide took us to a local restaurant where we ordered many different Turkish dishes – even Jessie tried some rice with tomato sauce on it, and there was not a bite left to be had afterwards. The girls took off to check out the shops and Ross and I enjoyed a Turkish tea (I drank the tea, he ate the sugar cubes). At 1pm we took off on the boat for the mud baths. Marina wanted to visit the mud-baths because the astute tour salesman suggested that the mud-bath would take 10 years off anyone that goes in.

We arrived at the mud baths and were treated to a beautiful facility. We changed into our oldest bathing suits and waded into the mud-pit. The mud was very fine, Jessie and I embraced it completely, Marina somewhat; Ross opted to be photographer.

They said it would "take 10 years off"

Showering off the mud is harder than you might think … the temperature and speed of the shower was reminiscent of a garden-hose on full blast through a spray gun. We helped each other clean off and then proceeded to the mineral bath (very aromatic). We got into what was very salty water almost as hot as a normal hot-tub in Canada.  The salty water made our skin feel very soft and smooth … but by the time we made it back to the boat both Marina and I were ready to have a shower.

Warm sulphur water after a cold cold shower!

That night we had another fine-dining experience – though this time without the kids along. They stayed on board the boat and listened to ‘The Help’ an audio book we bought for language arts. We have about 20 movies we can watch (each had probably been watched a dozen times) but more and more we’re not watching TV, more reading and game playing as we have found a rhythm to our cruising.

We are off to bed early, because tomorrow we’re on our way to Tomb Bay about 30 miles away, then onto Fethye and then around the corner towards Kemer. The weather is supposed to be fantastic for the next week – warm and sunny. Hopefully there will be wind.

Rhodes in the Morning, Marmaris in the Afternoon

Back on Tara, October 30^th was also ‘fall back’ day so is it 07:30 standard time or daylight time the catamaran whose dock we’re poaching comes in? Both Marina and I ended up waking up every hour during the night to make sure that we weren’t going to be late. At 5:45am the 60 foot powerboat beside us lit up and left. At 6:15am (or was that 5:15 am) we gave up on sleep, woke up Ross and moved the boat to an anchorage on the outside. It actually turned out to be 5:15am so we crawled back into bed for an hour or two before we set off for the day.

We wanted to walk through Rhodes during the morning, then head to Turkey in the afternoon. While the kids and Marina set off into Rhodes, I started the exit procedure.  Port Police, Passport Control, Customs (all in one place) then over to the Port Police (2 km away), and finally back to Customs (though they let me slide it under the door in at a closer office rather than walk another 2 kilometers). After about an hour and a half of fooling around – they originally tried to send me to another office until I pointed at Tara and said – that’s my boat, it is in this harbour, I joined the family walking through the old parts of Rhodes. You can see the castle and how it was rebuilt by the Italians when they occupied Rhodes in the early 20^th century.

The castle and old city are one of the biggest tourist attractions in Greece – and it’s not hard to see why. The weather was beautiful, about 25 degrees C and sunny so we walked around until we got hungry, then had  a nice lunch tapas-style – pizza, cheese balls, dolmades, roasted veggies, meat balls … lots and lots of food. After lunch we retired to the dinghy, went back to the boat, lifted anchor and started towards Marmaris Turkey. Again not much wind so we powered across from Rhodos to Marmaris – a place that looks quite a bit like Pender Harbour BC. Along the way we stopped and had a swim. Water is still above 20 degrees here so quite swimmable. Marmaris is a bustling town of about 40,000 people and they have a couple of marinas to choose from. Every time you enter a port you choose where you go based on what you need – close to groceries, or we need fuel. In this case it was driven by laundry. We hand wash our things in the sink and hang them to dry on the lifelines but there is only so much dirt can be removed in this way. The last washing machine cleaning we had was in Kremik. We left Kremik September 9^th. Today’s date is November 1^st. We figure doing laundry properly every couple of months is not just a luxury, it’s a necessity ;-).

So we went into the Yacht Marine – one of the biggest marinas I’ve ever seen. They store 600 boats in the water and another 600 on the land. Their Travel-lift is 330 tonnes … to give a comparison, the one at Granville Island is an 40 Ton Travel-lift. They were lifting some incredible yachts – some as long as 150-200 feet. The entire marina is like a jigsaw puzzle with 500 boats being arranged based on the day they will be put back in the water. Based on the dates (all written on the rudders), the first week of April will be a busy time indeed. The boats get hauled and pressure washed, then put on a trailer, taken to their  yard location and blocked onto the ground. A good percentage of yachts are being worked on as well, from minor cosmetics to full on refits. There are engine repair shops, a chandlery, canvass, electrical, welding, fiberglass, painters, and sailmakers all on site. Marmaris itself has dozens of good marine shops including a West Marine that got several hundred dollars from my pockets.

Relaxing...not the dog house...

Oh, look!  A camera!

 There are a number of people that also live there and spend the winter on their boats. This little community has access to a rather grotty gym, a common room, bar, restaurant, pool and many other facilities.  The irony is that because of the liveaboards, the washer/dryer was queued six deep when I got there in the morning. Quick change of plan, we paid for our laundry to be done for us – worked out to be 20 Euros but putting on a freshly laundered t-shirt …. Priceless.

Could you think of a better classroom?

In some ways Marmaris Yacht Marine was really neat – but Marina and I decided almost immediately that it isn’t for us. We’re travelers and we want to keep going. If it came down to living in the marina for a few months I’d vote for putting the boat up on the tarmac and flying somewhere else and do an overland portion of our adventure.  One of the things we talked about at dinner would be extending our Israel and Egypt trip to potentially go through the Suez Canal. We’re going to do the research on it to see whether it is feasible and safe to go there – we have heard two different (180 degrees opposed) viewpoints on whether you should go through. Apparently the pilots you must hire to take you through often hold up their customers for very large additional charges (what we’d probably call bribes). I read of one person needing to buy 100 cartons of cigarettes – even at $1 per pack that’s a lot of baksheesh.

Getting the Q flag ready - must be up so customs knows we're not checked in yet.

After three days in Marmaris it is time to move on, so we’re off to a bay close by and hope to tour some of the tombs carved in the rock above the Dalyann River above Caunos. No wind today so we are powering to get there, will hope to anchor out and arrange a tour boat for tomorrow.



Oh to be so relaxed.....