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.