Flashes of silver and red

Heading north, with Ormos Neon Liman ahead of us

There was a moment when we seemed to have it together. The water in Ormos Neon Liman, a sweeping dent in the top right hand corner of Lesvos, was so clear that I could see the anchor when it landed on the sandy bottom about 8 metres down. It dug in quickly. We had the bay to ourselves and were savouring that pleasure as the light drained slowly out of the sky.

The wind had dropped and shore sounds came very clearly to us across the water. Birds were making a joyous racket and somewhere far away bell-clanging goats were heading home. From inside the thick curtain of olive trees covering the hills came the voices of a man and a woman tearing strips off each other. Then the domestic was over, just like that. In the village at the end of the bay, someone turned on the red and green lights marking the entrance to the fishing harbour. The men would be home after dark.

We were still thinking about the swordfish. We'd seen him when the afternoon light was bright, about 200 metres from the boat. He'd leapt out of the water, pointed his needle nose straight up to the sky and spun on his tail like a dancer on points.  For a split second, his slender body was a spinning silver rod, hung above the water, and then it splashed down. He made about six leaps and splashdowns. It was incredible. Perhaps he'd been caught on a longline and what we were watching was his dance of death. Surely the little fishing boats out in the bay were too small to haul in a big fish like that....we hoped, against hope, that he had swum free.

The next morning we were ready for an early start. The forecast looked good to sail to Limnos, 60 miles to the northwest, but first we intended to motor, to make some distance west before the wind came in. I remember Alex saying, "Gentlemen, start your engines." He turned the key in the ignition, and waited as usual for the alarm lights to go through their rotation before kicking the engine over. But one light stayed on -  the red triangle with an exclamation mark - and a whining alarm. A quick flick through the manual told us we had a "serious problem". That's all.

Mytilene harbour

So, to cut a long story short, we aborted the passage north, and by evening, were tacking back into Mytilene harbour. There is nothing fun about coming into a small harbour under sail when you don't have the option of turning on your engine. Alex did it extremely well, but he got some practice last season.  I'm over it, just as I'm over the whole rigmarole of trying to find an authorised Volvo dealer who has a diagnostic computer to plug into our electronic engine bits. Without the computer, it's very difficult to know what exactly the problem is.  But it seems that a) there is no authorised Volvo mechanic on Lesvos and b) the authorised Volvo mechanic on the nearest island, Chios, doesn't have a diagnostic computer, and doesn't want to come to Lesvos anyway.

Mosaic floor from the house of Telephos, midtown Mytilene 100-200 AD

Today, which is Sunday, we turned bad fortune into good and visited the archeological museum in Mytiline. It's closed during the week because there's no money to pay for staff. We think the council must have no money to pay for rubbish collection and weed spraying either because Mytilene's streets are very unkempt.

Sixty years ago a lot of people from this island migrated to Australia, and apparently the story is starting again. A liquor shop owner, an affable man of about 50, asked us how much he would have to pay to rent a single room in Australia - he was thinking of going there. A friend who was there already had told him  you could earn $30 an hour. His wife and daughter were against the idea,  he said, but they'd built a new house seven years ago and now he couldn't afford the payments and taxes on it, and there were no buyers even at a bargain price. Everyone else was trying to sell too. As for business  - "look at my stock", he said. His shelves had missing teeth. Like Greece itself, he has a dire cash flow problem. He feels like a marked man, he told us. We bought a Greek sparkling wine on his recommendation. All we want now is a good reason to drink it. No flashing lights please.

A commemorative service on main street Mytilene

Time to dig a bit deeper

I'm in all sorts of trouble here. Far too much to show and tell. I'll imagine myself at primary school, standing in front of the class, legs trembling, with five minutes to do my talk. The teacher's at the back of the room, tapping her wristwatch...

Back to the wall of the best grave at Arykanda

This has been the week we started to get the hang of Turkey. Not so much modern Turkey, or the easy-going part of it we've come to know over the summer, but its previous incarnations which, now we've been here a while, seem increasingly important to learn something of.

Faces from Myra's past 

Demre's hothouses butt up against the ruins of  ancient Myra

I have a longstanding habit of finding my way into places through books.  Recently I've gone back to Orhan Pamuk, a monumental writer, and not one to underestimate his reader's intelligence. My Name is Red is set in 16th century Istanbul amongst a clique of miniaturist painters - he draws out of that esoteric brew the sharp dynamics which I am beginning to recognise as essentially of this country now called Turkey. Pamuk's books take for granted some knowledge of its glorious and inglorious history. I come up seriously short here.  Thankfully, Louis de Berniere's novel Birds Without Wings, which I mentioned in the previous post as being set in this part of Turkey (somewhere between Letoon and Fethiye, I'm guessing), assumes the reader is an ignoramus and for that reason alone it was enormously useful to read - actually, I couldn't put down my Kindle for several days.

Buried Byzantine church pillar at Olympos

Mosaic fragments in the bush at Olympos

I now have my Ottoman and my Byzantine empires better sorted; I understand a little more about the waves of Persians and Egyptians and Turks (people who came from Central Asia) which displaced the Greeks and Roman occupations on this coast and about why the tide is always out for the Armenians and the Kurds; I know more about how things stand now between Greeks and Turks (Cain and Abel, blood brothers) and about why the Turkish army and the inheritance of Mustafa Kemal 'Ataturk' has such political potency. But mostly, because of what I've read, I feel much more comfortable about being in Turkey as a non-Muslim (non-religious, to be exact). The people who've lived on this south-western region of Anatolia have never have been a homogenous lot. They're very used to rubbing along with 'infidels' and Franks, as the Ottomans used to call western Europeans.

Doorway in Kas

A Lycian king's lion tomb in Kas

Buying grapes and figs on the road in the hills behind Kas

A hundred years ago, before the brutal population exchange which accompanied the birth of the new Turkish state, the population of a town like Kas would have been a gritty mix of Turks (Muslims), Greeks (Christians), Armenians, Jews and drifters from various corners of the vast Ottoman empire. Everyone would have spoken Turkish. Occasionally people would have choked on each other's beliefs and ethnicities, but commerce then, as today, is a marvellous lubricant. I think the closest thing to being an Ottoman today is being American.

Today, Kas has a couple of mosques at least, but no churches I can see. Yet it is mellow, a live and let live kind of town, less indebted to the English tourist trade than its glitzy neighbour Kalkan, and yet open to persuasion. Perhaps this sophisticated new marina we're parked in, with blissfully few other boats around us, will change its character. I'd like to think not.

Texting at the base of the Lion Tomb

Backgammon passes the time in Kas

We came back to Kas a week ago, sporting yet another grievous injury to boating body parts. This time it was the Lewmar V3 windlass which had seized, terminally as we now know, as we were upping anchor in Kekova.  Thank God for electric winches is all I'll say, and spare you rest of the gory details - there have been too many of those already. The good news is that we've been able to buy a replacement in Turkey and it's here on the boat - and with luck, it'll be fitted by the end of the weekend.

While we were waiting for this (bigger V4) windlass to arrive from Istanbul, we did what we'd been planning to do anyway - hired a car to visit more Lycian ruins. Truly, you say, more ruins? Yes. More ruins. And not one site the same as another. All part of the Lycian League which I grow more and more fascinated by. Not just tombs, you see. So much more than tombs, in fact.

Before we set out on our travels through Lycia,  Alex been wondering how it was that he and Jan had missed it when they drove through Turkey nearly 40 years ago on their epic VW Kombi trip from London to Calcutta. "We were young, but we weren't totally uncultured," he said. As the days flipped by however, we realised that, with the possible exception of Myra, these Lycian sites in and beneath the Taurus mountains can't have been on the map back then. Locals would have always known about their ruins, and plundered from them, and perhaps a British explorer had passed that way a century before and plundered yet more and written a scholarly article or two for the Royal Whatever Society. But the money and the knowhow necessary to excavate these magnificent civic structures from the hundred of thousands of metres of silt and rubble under which they've been buried for two millenia has been available to the Turks only quite recently. Work at Patara, for example, didn't get going until the late 1980s, and at Olympos it was much later in about 2005.

Ruins at Olympos are scattered along the river leading to the sea

Roman temple lintel, Olympos

Olympos, despite the seductive name, is not really worth visiting yet. The ruins there are in their "natural" state, choked by vegetation, scattered, hard to piece together with the eye and far from being pieced together by the archeologists. The walk along the river is divine, but not so the seedy hippy strip which feeds into it. It's a long drive from Kas, and the best we could say for the effort we put in is that it was interesting to see the beginning of the excavation process - and then think of Ephesus, and of the treasures which many many decades of hard archeological labour have drawn forth from the earth.

Oops. The teacher is looking at her watch.

For sheer spectacle, Arykanda is the pick of the ruined Lycian cities. It was never as big nor as important as, say, Patara or Xanthos, but both those more famous cities must have envied the grandeur of Arykanda's setting, built as it was over five terraced levels high on a pine-clad mountainside overlooking a river valley and backed up against impregnable cliffs.  Archeological excavations started about 30 years ago and while there are still probably thousands of cubic tonnes of stony earth to barrow away, what's been uncovered so far is precious and marvellous.

Arykanda's amphitheatre is on the 4th of the city's five terraced levels

Arykanda's city hall led off the main town square

A huge bath house with a view

The press and babble of humanity which makes visiting places like Ephesus and Myra a bit of a trial is completely absent at Arykana, which is about 30 km inland from Finike and easy to miss.  Here you meet no touts and there's nothing for sale. There are no blonde Russian babes posing on terraces and tombs for the benefit of their Facebook friends, and no pompous tour guides bossing around their flocks. In fact, we saw almost no-one else at Arykanda during three hours.

The bliss of sitting under a pine tree near the stadium on the highest level, cutting into our tomatoes and bread, watched only by surveyors also on their lunch break.

Running track and seating (stadium) on the top level of Arykanda

In our solitude, and from that height, it was very easy to imagine a city in which people argued and applauded and bathed and shopped and loved until the earth quaked, and those who were left ran away to a place further down the valley.

Watching the boats sail by at Patara

We left the ancient port city of Patara till last, by chance, but that's not a bad way to do it. For the price of admission to the ruins of Patara you also get access to its better known sandy beach, Turkey's longest. There were many more people at Patara for the beach than the ruins, but it's hot, so very hot - still. We hired sunbeds under an umbrella (for the first and last time) and knew for certain that if you're from Australia or New Zealand you can't lie on a beach in Europe without thinking about home.

Roman arches at the entry to Patara

Patara was a port city built around the estuary of the Xanthos river, said by Horace and Virgil to be the birthplace of the god Apollo (??). The Lycians are thought to have moved there from Turkey's interior in the Bronze Age (3000 BC), but the height of Patara's influence was between about 200 BC and 300 AD when it was the capital of the Lycian League.  By the 7th century, by which time the Arabs had over-run the region, it was losing its clout. Its harbour had silted up, which is always a bad look for a port city. Patara is a now a swathe of wetlands (nesting for turtles) and sandy expanses covered in thorny scrub and olive trees which support a few sheep and goats. It is still pushing up ancient stones of incalculable significance.

Patara's 10,000-seat amphitheatre was even bigger than Myra's, which was bigger than Arykanda's. This was the big smoke, with big marketplaces, baths, temples (this was Apollo's town), etc. All the usual urban stuff. The most astonishing structure at Patara though is its restored assembly hall, or parliament building. From a distance the pale new stone which has been used to supplement the old stone jars the eye, offends it actually. What were they thinking?

Patara's reconstructed Lycian assembly hall, opened in 2011

Well, they, that is the Turkish government which funded the project to the tune of 6 million TL, were thinking this: "What makes this structure so special is that it once housed the national government of the Lycian League, a democratic government system setting a perfect example for all modern governmental systems, especially the Constitution of the United States of America." You need to get into it a bit, but the argument is made that the Lycian League, which first came together in 205 BC, negotiated autonomy from the Romans in 167 BC and lasted until the 3rd century AD, was the world's first recorded example of representative democracy. You sit on the benches of this chamber, which are organised in a semi-circle around a raised dais, and have at their centre a distinctive semicircular seat for the Lyciarch, who was an annually elected president, and you could be in a modern parliament. The French philosopher Montesquieu, whose book The Spirit of the Laws was the most political book in the 1780s (I've read), considered the Lycian League to be the best model for a federal republic. The framers of the US Constitution took note, and there are apparently several features of the Lycian system embedded in the US federal system, notably the way power is balanced out between the states.

So, there you have it - the cradle of democratic government is not Athens but Patara. This of course is the kind of thing that the Turks and the Greeks love to squabble about.

And I'm way way out of time. I'll lose points for that, but I've always been excitable when there are new stories to be uncovered.

Lycian inscriptions and honours outside the assembly hall

Back and forth

I did paddle my kayak around the lovely big bay of Cokertme, and for the rest of that day we allowed ourselves to believe that we were carefree.  Alex had noticed a New Zealand flag on the spreaders of a Canadian catamaran (above). When the gulet squeezed in between us had moved out, I swam over to make conversation - perhaps I could interest them in half a watermelon I hadn't been able to resist buying in Turgutreis? I could, and so we spent a couple of hours chatting with Dick (still a Kiwi after 42 years out of the country) and his Vancouver-born wife Marian who had spent 17 years working and raising kids in an American compound in Saudi Arabia and cruising each summer of those 17 years on this part of the Turkish coast. Interesting people. We haven't had many chance encounters of this sort so far, given the cracking pace at which we've been moving. 

And the pace continues, because in fact we weren't carefree. On the way out of Turgutreis, we'd paid close attention to the amount of charge being put into our batteries while the engine was running - and confirmed what we'd kind of known for a while but been able to ignore because we've been hooked up to shore power far too much. Nothing was happening. This is a bit of simplification, but for those who really want to know I include the next two paragraphs (feel free to skip if boat electrics do not interest you).

When Alex decided that Enki needed bow thrusters (and I am 100% in agreement there), he had to re-think her battery arrangement. Enki's previous owner had made do with a very small (200 amp hours) battery bank for the house batteries which in addition to everything else had to power the windlass. Alex doubled the number of batteries at the back of the boat, and put a couple more at the front which are dedicated to firing up the windlass and the bowthrusters. The Sterling charger which puts current from the alternator into the main battery bank is wired to look first (as they say) at the batteries at the bow. In other words, it's fooled into thinking they are the start batteries (we have another charger which keeps the actual engine start batteries full). Once satisfied that there's enough charge in those bow batteries, it's meant to turn its attention to the house bank which supplies the bulk of our power requirements on the boat. The trouble was, while the engine was charging the bow batteries, it wasn't going any further. We didn't know why, but the upshot of this was we've been running the generator to keep the boat electrics powered - and that, believe me, is NOT a happy situation. Generators, even quiet ones like ours, are only just tolerable. Some people have very strong opinions about generators (i.e. people who have them ought not to be allowed in quiet anchorages).  On top of that, running the engine and not topping up your batteries at the same time is like spending money and not being allowed to take home what you've bought with your hard-earned cash. It's humiliating. 

So, there we were, at Cokertme, trying to fool ourselves that we were at the start of our Turkish cruising, but actually we weren't. We had another boat problem which had to be fixed either by us (for which read Alex) or someone else. That didn't stop us from chilling out in "town" that evening. Cokertme is a tiny summer place, with four beachside restaurants which compete for your custom by sending out envoys in fast boats who race to help you with your shore line when you come in to anchor (you can also choose to tie up at their jetty if you wish). We were helped by a charming boy from the restaurant Orhan, so that's where we ate. Such a hardship, as you can see.  I chose my fish from a fridge (ignoring the flies which popped out as the lid was lifted). Its eyes were bright, as bright as mine. I am hoping like crazy that there will be more of these hardships around the corner. 

The next morning Alex systematically investigated outputs and inputs (that kind of thing), and I noted voltage and ampage, and to cut a long story short, by 3 pm we'd pulled up the anchor and were motoring back towards Bodrum into a muscular meltemi wind and against fighting seas. Bang, bang. There was a Sterling specialist in Marmaris. We needed him. Damn.

If this is all sounding drearily familiar, fear not. It gets much better. 

I don't have any pictures, sadly, but you are going to have to believe me when I say that the next day - Monday - was a day to make all the troubles we've had on Enki worth enduring. What a sail. What a ride. I've talked about Enki's great performance in light winds, but her performance in strong breezes is a blast. She's a big powerful boat, exhilarating to drive, very responsive to Alex's sail trimming and to the wheel, so smooth across the water, so solid in the water, and yes, so fast. 

We left early from Bitez, a beach suburb just west of Bodrum (how is it that a beautiful waterfront at 7.30 pm is a pulsating, neon-lit, crazy beat place by 11 pm? Even the hi-fi muezzin couldn't compete with the clubs on the shoreline). Initially we were thinking of stopping at anchor another night, but a phone call from our man in Marmaris asked us to come as quickly as we could. Ramadan ends this weekend, and the marine electrician was going on holiday. Huh? We hadn't even thought about Ramadan. 

So we sailed across the seaway from Bodrum to Kos again, rounded the tip of the Datca peninsula and didn't stop at Knidos (though many others did - Turkey in August, we're learning, is very busy on the water), but continued along this extraordinary coastline, with its steep weather-beaten hillsides, worn as bald as an old beast's hide. We didn't think to pull out the camera - dazzled by the light, by the barren, heavily-etched skyline, and in love with the constant wind from the west which pushed us along at a reasonably steady 7 to 8 knots, and sometimes more.

At Simi, the Greek island which some say is the most beautiful they know but which is now out of bounds to us for another three months, we turned right, and slid down its nude west coast, opting against the narrow channel at the bottom of the island but going right the way down to the Rhodes channel and then pushing up towards the Marmaris peninsula.  That's when we decided not to stop where we'd thought we would. We'd go a little bit further up the coast to give us a good start in the morning and reach Marmaris by midday. It was then about 5 pm, and the wind looked as though it had not much left in it for the day. Alex turned on the engine. We had 16 miles to go until the next viable anchorage. 

About 20 minutes later, as I was watching a stream of gulets making for the entrance of Bozuk Buku, and trying to pick out from the general ruinous rockiness the ancient citadel of Loryma which draws the crowds, the wind began to build again. And it built, and it built. 

We thundered along, glad for the first time in a long time of our hard top. Enki took a lot of water over her topsides. The wind wasn't cold, though looking back today at the barometer readings, which I took but didn't process,  there was probably a front passing over us. When we reached the proposed anchorage, it looked full (I was feeling for Mary and Joseph at this point) and very small. So we made for Marmaris, another 12 miles away. It wasn't a difficult decision - Enki could have kept sailing all night like this - though we came into the marina in the dark, which is not something I'd recommend. We had been to Marmaris Yacht Marina once before, last June, when we were looking for boats, so it wasn't entirely unknown, and fortunately, at 9 pm, there was still help available from the marina staff. We were guided into the travel lift dock for the night.  Here we are on the morning after. 

I can't say we're happy to be here. That'd be a lie. Marinas are like institutions - you check yourself in voluntarily, but somehow it's always much harder to leave than you expect it to be. I don't live well in marinas,  ever. Some people choose to stay for years on end. I don't understand that. As Alex says, a boat in a marina is a different thing from a boat at anchor. One is a caged beast, the other a free one. But we've been dealing with an excellent marine electrician who's looking after our charging problem, and cross fingers, it seems much simpler than we imagined. A loose nut on the back of a large fuse holder, a belt which isn't the right size. We're waiting for new belts now. They're coming from Izmir. Sounds exotic, doesn't it? So I am trying to be less manic about the marina.

The Russian boats here tell a story of a changing world. So do huge strutting power boats, ships really, with shove-it-up-you names like The One, and Forty Love.  Imagine if they had a charging problem. Game over. 

Beam me up

Photo taken by Markus from the top of Enki's mast

I wish I could say that this was Enki parked somewhere other than Port Napoleon, Pontoon E, but unfortunately not. We've had another setback. I'm calm now, but I haven't been calm. There have been tears. Our long-awaited davits, finally welded in place on Monday, don't work, and we won't be going anywhere until they do. As they stand, they can't lift the Zodiac dinghy. There's nothing wrong with the functioning of the davits - they're Simpson, a Rolls Royce brand, able to carry a load of 175 kg - but Sylvain, that charming rogue, has welded them onto the davit shoes at the wrong angle, so they're like splayed feet.

It wasn't immediately obvious. We were so dazzled by the stainless on our stern on Monday afternoon when he finally finished. "Tough," he pronounced, hanging his weight against each one. The next morning, as we looked at weather forecasts, and thought of bringing forward our departure, Alex went to hook up the dinghy and stood there, stunned. Sylvain and Matthew hadn't bothered to check what they were doing against the measurements of the Zodiac which has been sitting right beside the boat on the pontoon all the time. Dave and Alex have now done the maths. The davits need to be swivelled 12.5 degrees inwards to connect at the correct angle to the lifting straps of the inflatable. Trouble is, Silvain has welded the bolts into place. Oh la la. That's not actually what we're saying.

I still don't like the boating life. Or perhaps it's the south of France I don't like, or the offhand attitude of the marine industry to its customers. I can't decide which. But does it matter? Much further east, Syrian soldiers are murdering children in their beds.  All around us, the eurozone is making nasty splintering sounds. As I went to sleep last night, I tried to imagine myself into the head of Barack Obama as he and Michelle turned in. A bit strange, but I needed to get out of my own head. Which problem would they be trying to solve tonight? What's the next move with the treacherous Assad? How could they make any sense of European double-speak?

Our cruising time in the Schengen zone has been eaten away by the incompetence and shockingly blase work practices we've encountered in Port Napoleon. But so what? We've learned some hard lessons. We'll never again leave our boat in a yard when we want work done on her, and expect the work to be done when we return. We'll demand definite start and finish times from any workmen we employ in the future, or move on (if we can). We've been too trusting, including Alex, which is saying something.

One step at a time

How about some good news for a change? Here's Enki with her mast in, boom attached too. She's a yacht!

The riggers haven't yet finished tightening everything up. They worked all Saturday in the southerly gale which came in about 30 minutes after the rig was stepped.  And yes, Murphy stuck his foot in again - the turnbuckle at the bottom of the backstay couldn't be attached because the threads on both ends were identical (instead of opposing). Marcus claims his English isn't good (it is), but I read him loud and clear  - "oh, for fuck's sake" - when this little gem turned up. Nothing that a piece of rope can't fix, temporarily.

The rig went in on Saturday because we got lucky on Friday. There's a classy rigging outfit called Navtec on the outskirts of Cannes. Cannes is a super-yacht mecca, and in such a crowd, Enki's vital statistics don't raise an eyebrow. Not only did Navtec have a swaging machine which could handle our 14 mm stainless stell rigging, but on a Friday between a public holiday and the weekend, someone there agreed to operate the machine. Oh la la. What's a 240 km drive in such circumstances? We squeezed the heavy coiled stays into our tiny car's boot, and hurtled east. 

We managed only a sideways glimpse of the big toys on the Cannes waterfront. Their celebrity owners were in town for the film festival  but for us the main feature was the spectacle of Navtec's man Alexandre efficiently measuring out, cutting and swaging our pesky shrouds. A thing of beauty. Funny how your dreams shrink to fit the size of your ambitions. Our ambition is to leave Port Napoleon on a yacht.

Yacht stranded on Plage Napoleon

Sylvain at work on the davit supports

Yesterday the low intensified over us. At Plage Napoleon, an achingly barren stretch of grey sand at the end of our road, a yacht under sail had been blown onto the lee shore by weather much grimmer and uglier than any I'd imagined seeing in the Med. The driving rain and wind eventually chased away Silvain, our friendly man at the stern, who is making solid progress in attaching the davits to hold our dinghy. 

I don't believe I've mentioned the dinghy yet. Like Enki, she (as yet un-named) is over-sized. That wasn't our intention. Alex and I are well aware of our physical limitations. But for very French reasons - i.e. we took what we could get our hands on at the time - we've bought a 3.1 meter Zodiac RIB. It's flash. Hard bottom, a locker - but man, is it heavy. 87 kg. No way we can lift that without mechanical aids. Without Sylvain, we're floundering. 

Talking about floundering, there was small incident on Friday as we were leaving the boat, revved for Cannes. I fell in the water, fully clothed (obviously). There are no pictures, and the memories of those present will fade, as will the brutal bruise which has spread around my left thigh. My ego will recover too. Perhaps I'll learn - again - that you don't walk frontwards down steps on a boat (in this case, on the stern) with both hands full. Ouch, and ouch again.

I wouldn't want to be messing up my footwork at a glitzy Cote d'Azur resort like Port Frejus. We stopped by Frejus on the way back from Cannes, and unanimously agreed that nothing would drag us into such a claustrophic, artificial harbour. That was before we saw a yacht driven ashore by a vicious southerly gale though.

Port Frejus