Turkey is Not Southeast Asia or the Pacific

Posted on May 26, 2016 by Jamie

Sophie is currently moored in Sarsala in the Skopea Limani area of Turkey’s Lycean coast, just 5 miles south of Göcek. It is a pretty bay with a beach and a stunning view of nearby mountains. It feels like Desolation Sound back in British Columbia, except there are more tourists here. We will likely stay in the Göcek area for a week, focusing on Sophie school and boat projects. It’s quite a pleasant location.

Now that we have been cruising in Turkey for a couple of weeks, it’s time to share with you some early thoughts on how cruising here is different from cruising in Southeast Asia and the Pacific. We will also update you on some new additions to our home.

Cooler Weather Makes Our Machines Happier
The ambient temperature here is 20 degrees F lower than in Thailand, and this makes a big difference for how efficiently our machines work. As I’ve mentioned before, Sophie is simply a collection of different systems packaged together, and if the machines in these systems are happy, then Sophie is happy. We use Victron energy charger/inverters to charge our main battery bank, and they now run with up to 50% more efficiency in the cooler weather here, producing a peak charge of 180 amps (at 12 volts) compared to 110 amps in Thailand. The photo above shows 180 amps flowing into our main battery bank. This NEVER happened in the Pacific or in Asia. Never. The Victrons have internal sensors that reduce their charge when the machines get hot, and these sensors are apparently enjoying the cool Turkish spring. On the load side, our batteries are lasting longer between charges because our 2 refrigerators and 1 freezer aren’t working as hard in the cooler weather. Fewer people are opening up the fridges for cold drinks, and the machines’ compressors don’t have to work as hard to maintain their temperatures. Our watermaker also appears to be quite happy in the cooler weather, with less growth gunking up its filters. In Thailand we had to swap out the external filters every 2 weeks due to algae growth, but we haven’t had to change a filter since we passed through the Suez Canal. Our water tastes much better as well!

No Tuna, But Plenty of Turtles and Goats
We have been trolling for fish since we left Cyprus but have experienced exactly zero fish action. We have not seen any offshore fishing boats, either. There are some small fishing boats using hand nets right outside of harbors, and the tourist restaurants all serve grilled fish that look like little sea perch. The village retail areas also have fishing stores that sell $500 fishing poles and buckets of lures to the tourists who come here to pursue their dreams. But there are no big pelagic fish. None. There are, however, thousands of sea turtles along this stretch of coast. No one ever told me that we would see more sea turtles in Turkey than in any other country on our adventure so far. Turtles are everywhere here. We have to dodge them in the dinghy. Some of them are big suckers, measuring more than a meter across. Apparently June is turtle egg-laying season, and there are many egg-laying beaches nearby. There are also goats on every hillside of every harbor and every bay. They seem to enjoy eating right next to where we tie our shore lines. I haven’t seen any gnaw marks on our lines yet, but I remain alert to the danger.

Fewer Cruisers, More Boats
There are a lot of boats out on the water here in Turkey, but almost all of them are charters or tour boats, and the people who charter boats use them every day. From our anchorage right now I can see three boats out sailing in the afternoon breeze. By comparison, I think we saw three sailboats during our entire passage across Indonesia. But we haven’t met any long-term cruisers since we were in Israel. It’s still off-season, and we are hopeful we will connect with some fellow cruisers soon. It was easy for us to do so in places like Thailand, because when you walk into the cruisers bar by the marina, there were … cruisers there! But it doesn’t seem to be the same here, at least so far. Also, most of the charter boats here in Turkey are US-flagged, because apparently our country is a tax haven for people who purchase and operate charter boats in Turkey.

Our Lawn is Gone!
For the last three years we’ve had a patch of bright green seaweed growing at the end of our our stern transoms. Apparently the extra weight of all our systems, machines, and batteries pushes the last bits of transom into the water, and in the tropics the resulting warm water pools sitting in the bright sunshine become perfect growth environments for sea grass. This stuff was a bane of my existence throughout the Pacific and Indian oceans. All the scrubbing, scraping, chemicals, and antifouling in the world couldn’t prevent this stuff from continuing to grow. We lovingly referred to these grass patches as our lawn. But now that we are in the Med, the lawn is suddenly … gone! Our transoms are bright and shiny. We hope this is due to the colder temperatures and not to the presence of some new type of poison in the water.

Dust in the Wind
When we transited the Suez Canal, the boat became covered in a heavy layer of brown grit that blew in from the nearby desert. We assumed at the time that this was a minor price we had to pay for the convenience of sailing directly into the Med. However, we’ve been in the Med for a couple of months, and there is STILL a layer of brown dust that blows in from the nearby hills. Now that we are out anchoring, it seems crazy to run the watermaker for a couple of hours to produce enough fresh water to rinse off the boat if the boat will become covered with dust again in two days. It briefly rained last week, and the raindrops contained dust. In the Pacific, Sophie’s deck was clean due to the frequent rain, but Sophie’s waterline and back porch had a layer of green growth. In Turkey, the boat is dirtier due to dust-born wind, but the waterline and back porch are sparkly white. I am not sure which is better.

We Finally Filled Our LPG Bottles!
We use LPG for cooking in our galley and on our barbecue. We use US-compliant LPG bottles, but unfortunately every nation has its own standards (meaning non-US compliant) for the fittings used to fill LPG bottles. This wasn’t a problem for us in the Pacific because the presence of so many American boats guaranteed that every port had the correct gear to refill US LPG bottles. We also didn’t use LPG as much due to the tropical climate. 100 degrees of ambient heat in the cabin is a great motivator to not bake. In Southeast Asia, it was more of a challenge for us to fill LPG but we always seemed to find a way. However, no one in Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, or Eastern Turkey could fill our LPG bottles. We were starting to worry, cutting back on our barbecues and use of the oven. I wandered Turkish ports with an empty LPG bottle in my backpack, visiting different shops hoping someone could help us out. For two weeks I had no luck. But I finally found someone in Göcek who could help (on my third stop of the day, no less!), and we now have enough cooking gas to get us to Italy. I think the girls plan to bake later today.

No Dinghy Covers
In the Pacific and Southeast Asia, EVERY cruising dinghy has a canvas or Sunbrella cover over it’s tubes to protect the material from sun exposure. Here in Turkey, no one does this. It makes Sophie’s tenders stand out in a crowd.

Produce is Cheap, But Marinas and Restaurants Are $$$$$
We can go to a produce market here in Turkey and fill a big blue Ikea bag with just-picked tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, mint, basil, lettuce, peaches, green beans, and cherries for just 3 Euros for the entire bag. A loaf of fresh bread from a bakery costs 50 cents. On the other hand, a night on a dock in a marina costs over 100 Euros, and the nearby restaurants can charge that much for a meal for the 4 of us. Needless to say, we are enjoying our fresh produce while floating at anchor.

We Love Love Love our Big Yellow Shorelines
When we lived in Seattle, we purchased a length of 20 mm floating polypropylene rope for stern tying to shore when we cruised Desolation Sound, the area back home that looks just like this anchorage. Specifically, I went to Fisheries Supply and asked to buy 100 meters of this type of rope. They had a brand new spool of 200 meters and offered to sell me the entire spool for an extra $25 dollars. I agreed, used the rope for a summer cruise in Canada, then buried it in Sophie’s forward lazarette for the next 6 years. Well, Turkey is shore tying country, and we are putting our 200 meters of floating rope to good use, doing so with a great deal of love and respect. It is quite easy to work with, especially when shore tying in a strong crosswind like we did the other day. We secured the line to a bollard on the cliff, had 100 meters of slack in the water while the wind blew Sophie parallel to the cliff, got the line onto one of our big genoa winches, and then cranked Sophie snug up to where she was supposed to be. It was awesome.

Well, that should give you a sense for how cruising in Turkey compares to cruising in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. It’s not better or worse, just different.

Here is an update on some of the projects we’ve been working on this past week:

New Pasarelle
A pasarelle is a fancy name for the gangplank sailors in the Med use for getting on and off their boats when they are stern tied to a pier. Since all boats in the Med stern tie to piers while in harbor, pasarelles are mandatory equipment for cruising boats. For Sophie, we purchased and installed a 2.6 meter carbon fiber folding pasarelle made by GS-Composite in Slovenia.

Its features include a nonskid surface, carbon fiber rails, a weight under 8 kilos, and a compact carrying bag for storage.

We installed a stainless steel mount for the pasarelle on one of our port transom steps and then spent some time playing geometry with the supporting halyard to make sure that the windmills don’t chop away at the halyard during a sudden wind shift. Hazel would like to use the pasarelle as a diving board.

Bilge Pump for the Big Dinghy
Our friends (and fellow successful Indian Ocean and Red Sea passage makers!) Terry and Christine on Tekanova have the same model Highfield dinghy we have, and they installed an electric bilge pump on theirs. Jenna and I realized that we should probably do the same.

While we were back in Seattle last month, I found a low profile Rule model that fits in the dinghy’s bilge without having to permanently prop open the dinghy’s little bilge grate.

I did the wiring and installed a switch the other day. The new pump works great, and it means we will have a cleaner dinghy, because we will be more willing to hose it out when it’s in the water.

Raymarine GPS Woes
Since we left Israel, we have been intermittently losing our GPS signal on our Raymarine G Series multifunction displays. These are our primary navigation computers, and this new problem is annoying. We have multiple backup GPS units on board, including a redundant set of Navionics charts on Jenna’s iPad, so technically this is not a dangerous situation for us. Our overall Raymarine system is 8 years old, and we increasingly find ourselves having to reconnect various connection points on the proprietary SeaTalk and SeaTalkng networks that connect all of this stuff together. (The more I cruise, the more I realize that marine electronics problems are usually due to a faulty connection somewhere.) We’re still tracking down where the bad connection is for this problem, and I even disassembled the Raymarine GPS antenna and replaced its lithium battery, but that does not seem to have completely fixed the problem.

The Fleet is Out
Now that we are back in slow cruising mode, Jenna and the kids continue to focus on making great progress on Sophie School, and I continue to work through my list of boat chores and projects.

At this point we have our entire “fleet” of cruising toys out on Sophie’s deck and ready to use: both paddle boards, both kayaks, both dinghies, and all four bikes. We call our small dinghy “The Baby”, and we haven’t used it since Thailand.

In Europe, The Baby will be the main vehicle the kiddies use for getting to shore on their own, most likely starting today once school is over.

Next Steps for Sophie
We plan to slowly move ourselves along the Turkish coast for another couple of weeks before we meet some Seattle friends in Greece. We will spend a month in Greece, then head up to Montenegro and Croatia for July and August. We would like to spend the fall and winter in Italy and will try to get visitor visas for Italy to avoid the restrictions of Shengen visas (where you can only stay 90 out of every 180 days in most EU countries.)

As usual, time seems to be going by way too quickly. We are very very lucky to be spending our lives doing this. It’s all good.

From Egypt to Turkey

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Jamie

Sophie is currently anchored in Üçaĝiz harbor in the Kekova Roads on Turkey’s southern coast. Our location is 36.11.64n, 029.50.58e. This is our first anchorage since the Maldives, a very distant 12 weeks and 3,100 miles ago. We have made additional stops in Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, Turkey, and the United States since then.
We have covered a lot of ground. It feels great to be back at anchor, like our life is finally returning back to normal. Sophie School has resumed, the water toys are out, and Jenna and I just completed a paddleboard circuit of the harbor, accompanied by turtles, fishies, and goats. I even got to fix a toilet and a bilge pump since we arrived here the other day.

Back in March we rested in Port Ghalib, Egypt for a couple of days after our long passage across the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. There were 5 other boats there that had completed the Red Sea passage around the same time we did. Other than being able to connect with fellow cruisers, there wasn’t much to see. Port Ghalib is a destination resort that is suffering a 90% reduction in tourism due to the terrorist attacks in Egypt. Most of the businesses there had stopped paying rent to the resort’s absentee Kuwaiti landlords.

Our Red Sea guards departed Sophie a couple of hours after we arrived. The German bar that I had been looking forward to was a bit of a disappointment. They didn’t even serve German beer!

The resort maintains a sailboat that had crashed up on the rocks ten years ago as a reminder of how treacherous the local waters can be. They are proud of it, while all of the cruisers view it as a very bad omen.

On the positive side, Port Ghalib offered a very protected harbor, an easy government check-in process, and diesel fuel pumps right on the quay. It was an excellent stop after our long passage. We do not regret having made the long push to get here.

After Port Ghalib, we made an overnight run to Port of Suez at the entrance to the Suez Canal. For the first 6 hours we slowly motored into a steep chop, but the wind soon swung around to a southerly as forecast, and we had an uneventful trip for the rest of the way.

We stayed at the Suez Yacht Club, which 15 years ago had a restaurant, bar, and swimming pool. Fleets of 50 sailboats at a time used to stop there as they cruised up and down the Red Sea. Now the yacht club is reduced to a single plastic floating dock with no facilities other than a security guard. We were just the second sailboat of the year to call on them, after Egoiste, a Jeanneau 56 that left the Maldives three weeks before we did. The yacht club’s facilities have been handed over to Egypt’s military, which now uses it as an Army and Navy Club.

Our dock was just 100 meters to the entrance of the canal, and it was a little weird to see 1,200 foot container ships passing us as they made their way into the desert.
Our agent met us on the dock and took care of our paperwork. He also arranged for us to take a taxi into town and have dinner at a traditional kebab restaurant. It was our first real exposure to local middle eastern food. No one in the restaurant spoke English, and as a result we ordered way too much food, including chicken, lamb, pita, humus, tahini, salads, and sweets. We had some excellent leftovers.

The next day a tour guide took us in a van into Cairo where we toured the Cairo Museum and then visited the pyramids at Giza. It was a stunning experience, made all the better (and sadder) by the complete lack of tourists in the city. There were no lines at the Cairo Museum, and we were able to take photos of the Pyramids with no people in the background. Apparently this is the first time someone had done this since Napoleon visited over 200 years ago.

Some people question whether we are taking big risks visiting places where there have been terrorist attacks within the last year. Our view is that if we don’t visit countries that depend on tourism to support their economy, then the terrorists win. We will never do anything that we consider unsafe for our family, and we did skip visiting some other aras of Egypt this time. Cairo is no different than Paris or Brussels in terms of safety right now. The local people rely on income from tourists to survive, and we believe it is our role as world travelers to help them.

After a couple of days in Suez, we picked up our pilot and transited the first half (40 miles) of the Suez Canal, making an overnight stop at the yacht club in the port of Ismalia. It was surreal taking Sophie through the desert. All we could see were mounds of sand on either side of the canal, with army forts and emergency floating bridges every couple of kilometers. During the ’73 war, the Egyptian Third Army was trapped and surrounded on the wrong side of the Suez, and apparently the country never wants that to happen again.

We even had to stop for 20 minutes during the tail end of a floating bridge staging exercise. Each bridge section had diesel engines attached to it, and the entire bridge swung like a door across the canal. Later on during that day we passed by a couple of tanks that were crossing the canal on motorized rafts. There was a lot of military activity.

The only other thing I remember from that first day of our canal passage was how cold it was, how very very cold it was. Jenna stayed below doing Sophie School with the diesel cabin heaters running at full blast. I was up top with the pilot, and I was wearing a puffy insulated coat over 3 layers of sweatshirts. I even had to loan the pilot my Gill sailing jacket, and he was a little disappointed when I had to inform him at the end of the day that it was not a gift.

We made it to Ismalia by mid-afternoon and docked at the yacht club there. We caught the tail end of lunch at the restaurant, which was mostly serving a business crowd, and then went to bed.

The next morning we met out new pilot and quickly proceeded on our way. Once again it was cold, and once again our pilot assumed my loan of the Gill sailing jacket was a gift. He spoke no English and spent most of his time quietly praying. We offered him tea and kebab for lunch, which he was finally willing to accept once we convinced him that it was halal. At one point he even made pig oinking noises in trying to communicate to us that he couldn’t eat pork. But it all worked out, and he enjoyed his lamb, hummus, and tahini.

During this leg Jenna climbed to the top of the mast and took some pretty awesome photos of Sophie driving through a trench of water in the middle of an Arabian desert. Surreal.

By early afternoon we reached Port Said, and a pilot boat pulled by to disembark our pilot. We suddenly found ourselves motoring into the Mediterranean sea on a cold and sunny afternoon. We were greeted by some of the fattest dolphins we’ve ever seen. It was quite a moment for us.

We officially cleared out of Egypt back in Port Suez, so we had no need to stop in Port Said and headed directly for Herzilya, a port in Israel 15 kilometers north of Tel Aviv. It was an easy overnight run, highlighted by my 3:00 AM interview over VHF with Israeli Defense Forces. Even though we had contacted them in advance, they wanted to know the name, birth date, and passport number of every soul on board. The discussion took an hour.

Later that morning when we were 10 miles out of Herzilya, an IDF patrol boat roared out to greet us. They did a big circle around Sophie and then stopped 100 meters off our port side. They didn’t say much on radio, other than requesting that all passengers and crew please come up on deck. In Southeast Asia and in the Pacific, when military patrol boats greeted Sophie, the military on board whipped out their mobile phones and took selfies with Sophie in the background. The Israelis were all business and had a 50 caliber machine gun pointed at us the entire time. We also assume they had an infrared camera on their boat to see if we had any people hiding below. But they were super friendly and after a minute said “We hope you enjoy your stay in Israel” and roared off.

An hour later we docked at the marina in Herzilya. After we stern-tied to the pier, a couple of millennial guys in civilian clothes came up to us, said they were with the border police, and asked if they could search the boat. They were quite polite, and I wasn’t worried at all that they were going to ask us for a bottle of wine like the customs dudes in Tonga had done. When they were finished searching, they asked me to accompany them off of the boat, where we were joined by two young women who asked if I minded if they could ask me some questions. I had been through this drill during my previous visit to Israel, and it was fascinating to go through it again. One woman smiled and asked all of the questions while the other three watched me. Where were we from, what did we do for a living, did we carry any packages for people from the Maldives of Egypt, did we ever leave the key to the boat with anyone, what did I do for a living again? It was all super friendly and super competent, and after 20 minutes they smiled and said “Welcome to Israel. We hope you enjoy your stay!”

Herzilya is a luxury, modern marina, unlike anyplace we had visited since our stop in Singapore a year earlier. The marina complex included a Ritz Carlton hotel, a mall, and 20 outdoor tourist restaurants along a broad waterfront promenade. We stayed there for 10 days, making side trips to Jerusalem, Jordan, and Acre. We also reconnected with the Sagiv family, friends from Seattle whose children had gone to daycare with Leo and Hazel before we left on our adventure and they moved home to Israel.

We loved our stay in Israel, and we hope to return there before we leave the Mediterranean.

After Israel, we made an overnight run to Paphos on the western tip of Cyprus and stayed there for over a week. Paphos is a tourist town built around a small fishing port that doesn’t have a big marina, but we were able to obtain a stern tie berth on the police dock. The location was spectacular, with a small Crusaders castle across a courtyard from Sophie, and a bike trail led to Greek and Byzantine ruins just 500 meters away.

By the time we reached Cyprus, were beginning to master our new Mediterranean cruising lifestyle, and we liked it: stern-tie in an ancient harbor, visit local Egyptian/Greek/Roman/Byzantine/Ottoman ruins, avoid the waterfront tourist restaurants, and wallow in the Mediterranean “mezze” cuisine: eggplant, tomatoes, hummus, cucumbers, mint, yogurt, lamb, fish, olives, sparkling water, and dry red wine. Using Paphos as our base, we toured the entire island and feel like we barely scratched the surface during our ten days there. We plan to return to Cyprus during our cruise.

After Paphos we made yet another (and potentially our last) overnight run for a while and went to Kemer, a harbor with a marina next to the Taurus mountains in Turkey. Jenna and I had decided that after 3 and a half years living on Sophie, it was time to cut the ties and rent out our house back in Seattle. We needed a safe place in Turkey where we could park the boat for a couple of weeks while we flew back to the states to clean out our house and get it ready for tenants. Kemer fit the bill: a big, safe marina just 40 minutes from the airport in Antalya.

So we spent just 2 days in Kemer and then locked up Sophie and headed to the airport. Before we flew to the states, we made a 3 day stop in Istanbul, which is a spectacular city. We visited all of the big mosques and took a cruise on the Bosphorus. Jenna took 10,000 pictures. Our list of cities we plan to re-visit continues to grow.

Then it was off to Seattle for a 2 week visit that combined work and pleasure. We were able to pack up all of our stuff, move it into storage, clean up the house (almost), and get it ready for rental. We were also able to visit with our great friends back home. Leo and Hazel had multiple sleepovers, and one family even loaned us their brand new Beneteau 455 for a weekend rendezvous with our Seattle boating community friends. It is really important for us to maintain our roots back home, especially for Leo and Hazel, and this was a great visit.

After our 2 weeks in Seattle we flew back to Antalya and then cabbed straight back to Sophie. After being on a dock in Port Ghalib, Suez, Ismalia, Herzilya, Paphos, and Kemer, we really wanted to cut the dock lines and get back to anchoring. The Herzilya and Kemer marinas charged us us over 100 Euros per night for moorage, and for us that is not sustainable over the long run. So after one day in Kemer we saw we had a weather window and motored 50 miles around the corner to our current location.

We are now free swinging on anchor in a big protected harbor at Oçagiz. There are 8 other sailboats here. Yesterday, it was dead calm all morning, and then the wind picked up to 25 knots right after lunchtime until evening. This is apparently the weather pattern here. Within 4 kilometers are 2 castles and multiple Byzantine underwater ruins which we plan to explore with with the big dinghy. All of our systems are working, the kids have settled into their school routine, and the local produce is fresh and inexpensive. We are going to try to go three months without docking.

Once again, we are really grateful to be on this trip and feel incredibly lucky to be exploring the world on our boat.

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Monthly Archives: May 2016

Turkey is Not Southeast Asia or the Pacific

From Egypt to Turkey