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.