Kemer to Marmaris



Leaving Kemer

After 2 long days of 50+ miles from Kemer to Kekova Roads where we quietly anchored out and then on Skopia Limani (with a stop at 7 Mile Beach on the way), we spent two days in the Gocek area – an incredible place.

Clear water, wilderness, you can climb up the local hills and explore tombs of different types – pigeon-hole tombs that are simply scooped out of the rock to very elaborate tombs that have Doric columns and archways on them (all emptied out generations ago I suspect).

 The Turks are perhaps further along in terms of coast conservation than other places we have been so we were pleasantly surprised to see they had installed a line of new mooring balls – with 30,000 Kilo anchors (WOW .. now I can sleep well!) in the place we had intended to anchor: Skopea Limani. This area around Gocek is becoming a pretty popular cruising ground … clear water, short distances, quite enclosed so you don’t really need to worry about weather, some towns to visit: Gocek and Fethiye. If you had 10 days on a boat this would be the ideal setup – kind of like the Med’s version of the BVI.

Gocek Area

The biggest issue I would guess when it gets crowded is where to anchor and swim (thankfully part of cruising in Turkey is a need for holding tanks – and a 4000 Euro fine if you discharge a toilet near shore) … so they’ve just put down some 20 or so top class mooring balls. I guess the only downside would be that the afternoon entertainment of watching the charterers “wankering” is minimized – though I can recall a French boat taking more than a half hour to connect to a mooring ball – and given the simplicity of that manoeuvre it was just as entertaining, though in a different way.




 Anyway, it was time to get to Marmaris. Big weather is coming in the Greek Islands and we wanted to be in Marmaris to do some final boat preparation and then when the weather looked right hop off to Greece for our trip west. The weather was settled but cloudy and it looked like we were going to get a little rain … and we’d need to power for the 50 miles or so to Marmaris ….. boy did that turn out to be wrong. We powered out of Skopea Limani and into the open ocean – no wind, but some lumpy waves.

After about 10 minutes we had 15 knots from behind so we pulled out the sails and cut the motor. Over the next several hours we had everything … including some very, very big waves. If you can stand watching some amateur video I put about a 10 minute video of that day up on Youtube … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSsQGrqgfrw. It will give you a small glimpse of what the longer days are like, how we pass the time, and why you need to be careful at this time of year to watch out for the weather.

 Anyway, we made it, perhaps a little worse for wear, but as Marina said “that was a confidence builder” and we needed it after the 2nd day on our trip from Israel. You know … like at the beginning of the ski season everything looks dangerous and by the end it all looks easy. This is the beginning of our season and we’re happy we made it through the first day unscathed.


Coming back from grocery shopping