Cyprus – Cheap, Easy to Enter, Friendly, Worth a Return Visit

At 8:30 we woke up from our brief sleep and it was time to enter Cyprus. Cyprus is quite developed with nearly a million inhabitants and while it is affiliated with Greece, it has its own flag and it was admitted to the EU before Greece was.

Beach Volleyball!

Is it really December???

I wandered down to the Customs area, met a very nice customs agent armed with our passports and boat documents. I expected to do the same as in Greece, Port Police to enter the country, then to Police for passport control, then to Customs for a Transit Log, then back to Port Police to stamp the Transit Log; but in Cyprus, it’s much simpler. I checked in with Customs, he sent me down the 50 foot hall with my passports – then said to come back after checking in at the Marina office. The marina office was equally helpful, we got our slip, headed back down to Customs, they keep your passports and give you a landing card, and we were good to go. All told I was away from the boat for 20 minutes and we were checked into Cyprus. Wonders never cease.

The cost of the marina was about 10 Euros per day, there were no fees to enter or leave the country, the price of fuel was half that in Turkey …. This is a place we should spend more time at! Unfortunately our time was short – we needed to get to Israel before the weather set in.

Ross and Itai

Our friends the Elrons (Amir, Gaya, Itai and No’am – Yael was in Puerto Rico on a business trip and couldn’t make it) joined us in Cyprus with the plan of sailing with us back to Israel. The kids were out of school for Hanukah and thought sailing across the Med would be fun. We met the Elrons in Vancouver and it was a sad day for us when they decided to return to Israel in 2009 – but that opened up the opportunity to spend time in Israel, Jordan and Egypt for us … so when one door closes, another opens.



Itai, Jessie, Gaya and Ross

 They arrived at Larnaca from the Airport early on Monday morning and we spent the day on the beach and hanging out. Our plan was to leave for Herzliya on Wednesday but our plans were changed to leave on Tuesday because a big storm was coming on Friday and we didn’t want to chance being caught out in a gale with nowhere to hide. Basically between Cyprus and Israel is about 200 miles of open ocean and there is nowhere to hide anywhere. Unlike Greece or Turkey, there is nothing but open ocean … no shelter anywhere in the Eastern Med other than man-made marinas, so you must be careful with the weather or you could find yourself in some trouble.

Leaving Larnaca Marina

So, the Tuesday morning we left Larnaca after filling up at the gas-dock and left for Herzliya at 11:00am.


Our loose plan is to stop at Larnaca on the way back to Turkey, and spend a week exploring the countryside by car or bus. The people are friendly, food is great, and we can pay for our tours with the monies we save on moorage – woo hoo!

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.

Tennis Anyone?

What great fortune to have our own semi-private tennis court 5 minutes from the boat, and right next to the Navigator (for après tennis libations). I (Marina) was thrilled the crew agreed that Kemer would be a better place to spend time than Marmaris, knowing the court was there. Matt, Ross and Jessie made good use of it as well. A couple of times I went out on my own and used the wall and practiced serves (that were very shaky when we first go there!).

John from Saphire, a fellow cruiser from the UK, organized training sessions several times a week, Saturday tournaments (which my partner Herri from Switzerland and I won once) and John and his wife Chris joined Matt and me for an almost daily match. The girls taking on the boys and we were very evenly matched, one set going to 10-8 (the girls took this one!). The courts had lights and didn’t cost us a penny…heaven yet again in Kemer.

I’m pretty sure we’ll make our way back to Kemer as we head back north and west in the early spring, I promised to help Engin and Mehmet, Kemer staff, with a few sessions on the court.

AIS Radio, My New Best Friend

One of the new additions to Tara’s inventory was an AIS radio made by Standard Horizon. AIS is a service that all ships over 100 tons must have on board and it’s a bloody good idea. When used with the Radar it makes life a lot easier at night.

While we only have a receiver (transponders are another $1000 but will be worth it if we’re going to make ocean passages), it is very useful.

The way it works is that the navigation information from a ship (speed, course, heading) is broadcast over the digital VHF channel 70 and updated every second. The computer in the radio then takes our information (speed, course, heading) and plots where the other guys are, and gives you their information and calculates their bearing (where they are from you on the compass), closest point of approach – how close you’ll come to one another; and when that will happen.


So when you’re out at night you can see lights at between 10-12 miles away. We then correlate this with the Radar, and the AIS radio. By using eyeball, Radar and AIS, you can keep all traffic straight as to who is where, and also understand whether you’re on a collision course or not. The toughest thing about navigating at night is figuring out which way a boat is going relative to you. The AIS system gives us the ability to understand that early in the process and do small course corrections to avoid traffic.

Awesome use of technology – right up there with Autopilots, GPS, bow thrusters, powerful anchor windlasses, roller furling, electric winches ….. and rum.

Let’s all go to the Berke Ranch

Jessie on Dilan



OMG...Ross wearing long pants!



My mom and Dave live on a ranch in Frenchtown Montana with a menagerie of animals that includes 5 horses, 3 dogs, and a large and varying number of indoor and outdoor cats. We’ve gone riding at the D-bar-F a bunch of times so we thought that a horse riding excursion would be a great activity for everyone while in Turkey. There’s a dude-ranch outside Kemer called the Berke (Pronounced Ber-key) Ranch and they have a catchy little tune on their website that’s been stuck in our heads for a couple of months … “we all go down to the Berke Ranch ….. it’s OK” – if you want to have a song you just can’t get out of your head go to http://www.berkeranch.tr/

 

The Berke Ranch is a spa, a dude ranch, a horse training facility, and hotel. They sent a mini bus to pick us up and we chose a 3 hour ride (about two hours into it we were asking ourselves why we didn’t pick the two hour ride). We trotted around the ring for 10 minutes getting used to the horses, and then headed off to the trails with our wrangler. We did a lot of walking on roadways then on trails and into the bush.

The saddles were Australian saddles, kind of in-between a Western (big ones with horns to hold on to) and English (small ones that have no safety grip). The Aussie saddles are like English saddles but also have a strap you can hold on with – the horses are also trained a little differently – Western horses use neck reins, where you pull the neck over, these guys were bit trained so you pulled the bit gently to get them to turn. I was just holding on with my legs as tight as I could, with my hand gripping the strap firmly when we were cantering, and trying to stay on.

 Sharon wanted a slow and gentle horse … then lamented her choice when her horse was so slow that we all passed her and she had troubles keeping up. Ross’ horse was a bit of a blighter – wanting to kick anyone that came close. They gave Dave, the most experienced rider the ‘lazy’ horse because as an experienced rider, he could get the horse to keep up. Dave was surprised by his ‘lazy’ horse as it decided to take a bit of an unexpected romp down a hill … and he was not particularly impressed with its actions and reined it in quickly ... I’m thinking that if an experienced rider can be caught unawares …. it made me grip a little bit tighter.

 After about 2 1/2 hours of riding, Granny and Dave dismounted and walked their horses back to the barn. I guess that’s their normal way of riding back home and it’s probably easier on both the horses and their hips and butts. Jessie, Dave and Marina stayed with the horses and curried and washed them after the ride. Ross, Granny and I went to the restaurant and had a drink (maybe an Ibuprofen too) and ordered lunch. After lunch we headed back to Kemer and all had a long and well deserved nap.

Granny and Dave Visit ….. Finally some company from Home

From November 15th to the 21st we had our first visitors … Granny Sharon and Dave from Montana. They were on an annual trip to Europe to collaborate with some academic muckity-mucks and tour around Prague. For Sharon it was a bit of a farewell tour because she is retiring in January. (As I have been heard to say, the Canucks can now win the Stanley Cup because hell must have frozen over now that Sharon is retiring)

We had a whirlwind 5 or 6 days with lots of activities. I picked up Sharon and Dave at the airport with a ridiculous amount of luggage – most of which were care packages for the family … new toothbrushes, lots of Ibuprofen, an Apple Mac-Mini computer, an AIS Radio, a wireless autopilot controller, new heads for our navigation instruments, clothes, etc. etc. There was an entire big suitcase crammed full of our stuff.

Thankfully there were no customs issues and they sailed right through immigration. I picked them up at the Antalya International Airport – Antalya is a city of about 1,000,000 people on the coast of the Med, they had staged through Istanbul. We piled their luggage in the rental-car, came back to Kemer Marina, and then enjoyed Happy Hour in the Navigator. Many or most of the cruisers are retired and live on their boats part of the year and in their homes for the rest of the year. Sharon and Dave fit right in with a bunch of the cruisers – they found fellow PhD’s, former pilots, nuclear physicists, University Professors and the like – we were worried about whether they’d like it before they arrived – good conversation and cheap liquor is all you need to keep them going.

Rather than stay on the boat they stayed at the Meder Hotel – an all inclusive 4 star hotel near the marina. While the amenities are nice, the hotel has been well used over the summer season and while it could have been great, it was well on the grotty side of the ledger. It was, however, much larger than the cabin we were offering plus it had its own washroom – probably a big plus. So rather than move in with us for a couple days they stayed at the Meder.

We went touring around quite a bit when Granny and Dave were there, we took a day excursion to Olympos, an ancient town about 60 klicks down the road from Kemer, then to the Chimaera, a place where natural gas escapes to the earth’s surface causing fires to burn out of cracks in the rock. Homer wrote about the Chimeara, a fire breathing monster, part lion, part goat and part snake, that was immortal. The hero Bellerophon, who could ride Pegasus, errantly charmed the queen, so the King sent him on a quest to slay the Chimaera thinking he would lose which would rid him of his competition. However, Bellerophon was a clever man and once he saw the Chimeara in its valley home, he had Pegasus stand on the overhanging ledge and stamp its feet, causing a landslide covering the Chimaera – and the fire from it’s breath is what comes through the rocks today.

The Chimaera is located on a mountainside and is about as easy to get to as the Grouse Grind … Dave advised Sharon that he wasn’t going to make that kind of walk and they prudently stayed behind. The four of us walked all the way up (Ross was a bit grumbly because he was hungry and wanted to meet a friend at the Marina). We made it all the way up to the top – the stairs are spaced so that one leg does all the stair climbing, so I would time twenty right, then twenty left. The trip was worth it though, it’s like there are a bunch of BBQ pits with glowing coals and flames. We had seen them from the road (most of the way up the mountain) and had we known what a tough climb it was going to be we might have opted out – or at least brought some hot-dogs, marshmallows or the makings for Smores.

We also took Tara out for a day sail (Marina moved us in and out of the dock like a pro) and anchored in an ancient bay called Phaselis. There were ruins to see but everyone opted to sit on board the boat and soak up rays. The Alexander family all took a jump into the Med. Water temp was still in the 20’s so we had a nice swim. We had lunch, picked up the anchor and started sailing back to Kemer. We set the spinnaker (Granny brought us the new snatch block I bought from EBay) and had a nice sail back towards the marina.

 Another day we went to the Berke Ranch – a local dude ranch just outside Kemer. They have about 25 horses and a beautiful setting. We spent most of a day there riding and having a great time. Granny was very generous and paid for our horse excursion ….(It was most welcome and one of the most memorable things we’ve done on the trip so far – deserving if its own blog entry).

Then just like that – the trip was over. We decided to take Sharon and Dave to Antalya to stay their final night … Kemer is about an hour from the airport and they had a 7:30am flight so back up the time and you’re leaving at 4:00am, so closer to the airport is better. There were closer places but they weren’t up to Sharon’s standards so …. They stayed at a big beach-side resort with a fabulous pool and garden. We had a late snack and said our goodbyes. I think they had a great time and we sure enjoyed having them visit us. Granny was making some noise about coming back in the Spring with my sister and her daughter Chloe … that would be awesome too. Our best times are happening when we meet new people and hang out with friends.

Kemer – the Marina that thinks it’s a Yacht Club

The walk towards the Navigator Pub from our Boat

After reading all the business books that I do and experiencing indifferent service nearly everywhere, you just get used to people “mailing it in”, so when you come across an organization that really strives to care it’s a bit overwhelming. Kemer is that kind of place … everyone tries to make a difference, make your stay more pleasant, make you feel welcome. It’s truly a magical place in that way.

Mail and Engin ... passing me a beer !

I have been a member of Royal Vancouver Yacht Club for 20 years, volunteered on committees, represented the YC in events in different countries, participated in hundreds of regattas, and with the exception of a few people … Carmen, Nevaz, Warren, Marcus, James, Mark – I am basically unknown. In the case of the Scott Point caretaker, he goes out of his way to annoy us every time we go there (about 20 times a summer) by pushing us away from the dock saying that only RVYC members are allowed to use the facility – apparently we aren’t easy to remember.

Jessie and the Staff of the Navigator

How is it then that we can arrive in Kemer and within 3 days have the entire staff knowing us and our children, calling us by name, knowing our favourite food and drink, and our kids able to order a burger and a drink on a chit when we pay for it later, whenever we’re ready … heaven. On my birthday the Marina Manager came by our boat and wished me a happy birthday … and apologized for not being able to make the party Marina was throwing that night. I nearly fell into the water with surprise.

Dancing ...

Every day from 6-8pm is “happy hour” at the “Navigator” kind of like the Star & Dragon at RVYC only a lot cozy-er with a fireplace and the walls covered with plaques presented to the bar from yachties containing old and broken yacht paraphernalia hung everywhere. Nearly every day, all the cruisers come for cocktails and about half of them stay for dinner ….. and you have a place that feels like a Yacht Club .. maybe even better. Mix in a couple dozen very interesting cruisers from all over Europe and North America and you’ve got a vibrant community with lots of activities (tennis, tennis tournaments, hikes, fitness, daily radio networks, movie nights, art classes, games nights, line dancing, Turkish lessons, concert nights and more.)

Marina teaching the Bar Tenders 

Lots of fun on the boat ... getting lots of gifts ...

 During the time at Kemer one of us had a birthday and Marina helped get the entire community out to a party to celebrate it. She treated everyone at the bar to her famous 'Lemon Drop Martini recipe and setup a DJ for dancing and partying. 


Kemer is a tourist town, not very much other than hotels, shops and restaurants so it is peaceful and quiet to boot at this time of year. It would be heaven if there was a well-stocked workshop at the marina, just like we have at Coal Harbour – with a table saw, band saw, drill press  that would make it near perfect.