Getting out of Turkey – Easier than it Sounds (And the trip to Cyprus)

Looking back at Kemer

Ahhh, joys of exiting a country. One thing we’ve learned on this trip so far is the exit, seems to be almost more important than the entry of a country. And when you have to deal with Police, Customs and Immigration, and Harbour Authorities it takes time…lots and lots of time. However, occasionally a marina will help you get it done (or an Agent for a fee) and this can shorten the time and aggravation. Leaving Kemer was a challenge. The marina office staff tried hard to get it working for us but due to someone on vacation and a computer system not working, they couldn’t tell us when we would be able to leave. We were ready to go, wanted to go, had to get to Cyprus so the best alternative was to head out and go to Antalya, 2 hours out of the way (in each direction!) with the hopes we could still check out.  

The Turkish Coast

It worked but we had to ‘check in’ the marina there, e.g., pay for a day’s moorage, in order to be there in order to be allowed out of there…so, lots of money and 3 hours later we were checked out of Turkey. Now we HAVE to leave the country, so, we did. It was about 4:30 in the afternoon, right at sundown, and it gets really dark around 5:30 pm – it will be a long, dark night. But…what a glorious night it was! Calm, not much traffic, warm, so many stars, phosphorous to let us see the 100’s of fish around the boat, and a sliver of a moon eventually came up, following Orion across the sky. Jessie and I were a team and Ross and Matt were a team, taking shifts. Jessie and I like the first one so we can take the 2 am – 6 am sleep shift. We talked, played cards, and played hangman on her ipod. Dawn was lovely and around noon we got to Paphos. A totally uneventful passage, the engine and systems worked perfectly, the crew was happy, we weren’t that tired … this stuff isn’t that hard is it? We’re starting to get the hang of this passage stuff.



Ross on Shift



Sunrise on the Way

We nosed into the harbour at Paphos mindful of shallow depths (less than a half a meter under the keel – made even more un-nerving by the water being spectacularly clear and the bottom looking like it’s about 1 foot away) and noticed there was no place to berth…we didn’t like the look of anchoring there nor the feel of it and decided to keep going to Limassol – the next harbour about 40 miles away.

Mid Morning

By the time we got to Limassol it was pitch dark and the marina there had told us they had no space available. There is a commercial harbour you can anchor in, but we decided it wasn’t a great idea to anchor in a strange harbour in the dark, with lots of commercial traffic, where you can’t understand the language of the guy on the radio and when you haven’t cleared customs, so; we pressed on to Larnaca…night 2 of this trip well under way. Limassol is about 240 miles from Antalya (plus the two hours of powering to Antalya from Kemer) and we had been powering for something like 32 hours, and we looked like we were nearly out of fuel on our port tank, so we transferred fuel from the starboard to the port tank – an activity that has caused us engine problems in the past – though we fixed that when we were in Kemer … right??? Almost immediately we started to experience the same old fuel issue – the engine loses revs and begins to run erratically. This time it quit entirely, so out came the sails, then after Matt got the fuel line cleared out, the we put the sails away and we powered …… then pulled the sails out again when the engine quit (again)… then in…then out…then in. Thankfully there was a nice breeze to keep us going in the general direction we wanted (OK…it was on the nose but we were moving at around 6 kts) and we knew we could solve it well enough to get us into the marina at Larnaca.

Cool Sky

To make matters a bit more challenging, the GPS decided to act strange too, it couldn’t get a satellite fix for some reason. We have a hand held backup to tell us where we’re going, but the interface to the new AIS system that was slaved to the GPS Chartplotter stopped working. The AIS system gives us wonderful peace of mind in the dark as it provides information on other ships within 15 nautical miles of us – telling us their course and speed and also how close they will get to us at the closest point of approach (CPA), and when the CPA will happen. So we know who to change course for and who to ignore. Nice!

Back to basics without electronic navigation aids, we used good old Mark 1 Eyeball, search and figure it out yourself tactics (both Matt and I were on deck) and with the naked eye and good binoculars, we comfortably made it into Larnaca Marina around 3:30 am – very tired. Everyone came up on deck to get us secure to a high cement dock – which was quite nasty with metal fittings and the like on it, but the weather was calm and it was sheltered from freighter wakes, so we went below and slept like logs until 8:30 am, and got up to meet Cyprus and enter the country.