Red tape

We're legal. Turkish residents for a year. How about that?

We picked up our little blue books from the port police with four days to spare on our tourist visas. For one as pathologically law-abiding as myself, my relief can't be under-estimated. I was skipping. Top marks to the Turks for efficiency too. Our applications were processed in two weeks,  exactly as promised, notwithstanding a major public holiday (it felt like Easter to me) falling smack in the middle of that period.

And we're mobile too. There are no photos yet, but the unthinkable has happened - Alex riding a bicycle. As evidence, I give you not one, but two bikes parked at Enki's stern. He's talking picnics. I'm doubtful, but I like his direction. At the very least, having bikes brings our outlying pontoon that much closer to town and its amenities. Yesterday, spotting ominous clouds, I sped into the chicken shop and was back before the rain quickened, dodging huddles of tourists doomed to be drenched on their way back to the cruise ship dock.

There won't be many, if any, more monster liners into Marmaris this year. We're definitely in the off-season now. Race week ends tomorrow. It's been fun, in a crazy way. Plastic sandals and sailing paraphernalia cluttering the pontoon. The new Russian middle-class wearing spanking new boat shoes and matching sponsored polo shirts. Morale-boosting Russian march music - think Smirnov vodka ads - blaring as competitors hasten out of the marina towards the start line each day. The Dutch alongside us counter by turning up the Internationale. I heard boats belting out Highland pipes and rap this morning, but the Russians definitely have the musical advantage. "We are the champions...." I can hear from further down the pontoon. They'll give it a nudge tonight.

The guys next door (and below) 

And when they're gone, we'll be left with the hard-core cruisers. We're meeting a few of them now, and liking what we find. While we were away last weekend, another Hallberg Rassy (our kind of boat) tied up three along from us. Whisper HR, she's called, and she's from Melbourne, via Asia. May and Kevin shipped her to Turkey in April. They know Dave and Melinda, who spent the first two months of the season on Enki, and they knew Russ, who bought our old HR42 Andiamo and sadly died while cruising her in Malaysia. The neighbourhood suddenly feels a lot more like home.

Coming in

Enki turns north towards Marmaris

First thing this morning, as I walked past the electrics panel on my way through to the galley to boil the kettle,  I reached to flick off the anchor light switch. That's when it hit me. We've "come in". We won't need to be turning off - or on - the anchor light for at least six months. A lot of other things I've learned to do as a matter of routine are now redundant - like checking on our charge status and rationing my shower time (both power and water are piped onto the boat from the utility post on the dock), listening - and I mean really listening - for the noises the engine makes, being aware of how the boat is swinging on its anchor, and what that means, knowing what the barometer is doing, and....well, all the usual boating things.

She's called Marina

And the outlook's different. Here (above) is what I saw as I stepped up into the cockpit yesterday morning. This morning there was another one just as big to take its place. They do somewhat overwhelm the view.

She's leaving town

Morning blues

There's always an ending, isn't there? We left Gocek Bay on a day to cry for, under a bright sun which had forgotten it was sliding towards November and with not much promise of sailing the 38 miles to Marmaris.  We've had some exhilarating sails in Turkey over the past couple of months, but only a handful. More times than we'd have liked we've motored or motor sailed to get to where we're heading. But who's complaining? We've got oceans ahead of us, and sliding across flat Mediterranean waters might, I suspect, seem quite attractive at some point during an ocean crossing.  For an hour or so, shortly before we entered the grand shelter of Marmaris bay, the wind veered and picked up a few knots, and there went the season - Enki scooting along under full main and genoa, heading in the right direction, at a gentle 5 to 6 knots. A good ending, in other words.

In town yesterday, as we went back and forth between the port police and the tax department, going through the steps of residency application, the temperature reached 33 degrees, making it that much harder to come to terms with our new status as "winter" liveaboards in Netsel Marmaris Marina. It seems we are one of the last to come in. The marina is pretty full, though most boats are not occupied.

Here's one that we recognised. In Fethiye we'd looked for Lazy Jacques at Ece marina in the place where we'd last seen her, but she wasn't there. Gone sailing, it turns out.  Chay Blyth and his lady (she's Lady Blyth, to his Sir) were tidying up alongside at Netsel yesterday. No time for small talk. They'd been out for 10 days, he said. Oh. I vaguely remember meeting him many years ago, very briefly, when I went to Southhampton to "cover" one of those round-the-world-the-wrong-way races he organised. He's many other things, but gracious is not one of them. We don't expect to see any more of the Blyths, but we hope they cruise well. "It'll keep us out of mischief," he said.

Things are quieter on the boulevard in Marmaris

Three competing muzzeins are singing the loyal to prayer as night falls. Alex has pickled the watermaker. Regularly making water and flushing the watermaker have been among his many routine tasks over the past six months. In the next day or two I'll empty and defrost the fridge and freezer. We're planning another road trip, something to keep our spirits from collapsing. We want to take another look at Ephesus, in comparative solitude (who am I kidding?), and swing by Turkey's other star ruin, Pergamum. Alex has always wanted to go there. Then we'll come back to settle properly into our temporary home. Buy a pushbike. Join the Turkish conversation class. Meet the neighbours.  Learn new habits.

Marmaris old town - her best angle

Autumn pleasures

No need to kick - so much salt in the water

We're floating indolently towards the finish line, an unexpected run of impossibly beautiful autumn weather keeping us tethered to a mooring buoy in Fathom Cove, at the southern end of Gocek bay.

We had considered leaving for Marmaris today, tugged back to town and marina by the need to apply for permanent residency before our tourist visas expire. But as the day revealed its loveliness, we hesitated. Tomorrow, we said. We'll leave early, hope for a bit more wind than is forecast (from the southwest please), and deal with the visa first thing on Wednesday.

So today we stayed still, listening to the hollow knocking of goat bells, the lapping of water against my kayak trailing from Enki's stern, the sweet chatter of birds in the pines and olive trees which coat the steep hills. In the cracks of the rocks, there are autumn crocuses. Irresistible. Standing on top of the high cliff behind our anchorage, we picked out the distinctive shape of a Lycian sarcophugus amongst what at first glance was just rubble. An unmarked tomb. These things don't happen to you  in marinas.

For the past few evenings, a couple of fishermen have set their nets un-nervingly close to Fathom Cove's deep water moorings under the cliffs, perhaps reclaiming their traditional grounds, willing we stragglers to move on. Who knows.

But we'll all be gone soon. There are some last-minute charterers but fewer and fewer. Today the bay seemed to empty out. By the second half of October many longer-term American and European cruisers are calling it quits and going back to their other lives - or at least to solid ground - for the cold months. Our Nordhaven friends, Suzanne and Brian, hauled out in Gocek last week and headed for an apartment in Nice (they had dinner aboard Enki but wouldn't you know it, we all forgot about the backgammon board). Also in Gocek we finally caught up with Sea Cloud, another HR48 owned by a couple of affable Aussies who we've been in email contact with since last year.  Ian Cook is a medical specialist back home in Sydney, and his wife Cathy manages his practice. We gather they're pruning the practice back to give them more time to cruise, but last week they put Sea Cloud up on the hard until next spring. In many ways I envy them going home (I don't need to say how much we miss our kids - or do I?), but perhaps the reverse is true too. With luck we'll see more of the Cooks and Sea Cloud on the water in 2013. I hope so. 

First light in Fathom Cove

"Serious" cruising yachts (i.e. the ones with structures supporting wind generators and solar panels) have been all but invisible over summer, obscured by the armadas of gulets and charter fleets, but now they're more conspicuous. Like us they're sucking back on the last of the season. Will we meet some of these people in port over the winter? I'm curious to know other people who live aboard their boats. But we have wondered if perhaps there are fewer of us around...

Enki likes her space

People say it's been a quieter year in Turkey. Has the effective closure of the Red Sea route (because of Somalian piracy) combined with the aftershocks of the GFC and the chronic sickness of the eurozone taken the shine off the Mediterranean cruising dream? Then there's the unknown of Syria...What triggers a regional war is always more obvious after the event, but it's difficult to see what Turkey stands to gain from getting embroiled in Syria's civil war. But as you can tell, we're not exactly in the middle of things - thankfully (the Syrian border is about 600 km from here).

In these last sweet days, we have been walking a bit (we overtook the tortoise on the way down the hill from the tomb), admiring the olive crop, watching the sky, loving the gentleness of the temperature and committing to memory the colour and silkiness of the water.

Baths at Ruin Bay - Cleopatra's, they say

Looking north over Gocek bay (Skopea Limani)

The nightly thunderstorms which made us so twitchy all last week seem to have drawn back into the interior. The relief. It seems hardly believable that a month ago we were enthusing about "our first clouds". There are clouds in the sky every day now, and we're back in familiar territory, trying to read their intentions.

Border crossing

Things got even wobblier on Enki after we left Patmos, by which I don't mean that the mast started groaning again and a mainsheet block exploded as Enki went through a jibe too fast off the end of Kalimnos island, its jagged plastic edges ripping through the mainsheet for good measure.

No, those things are relatively straightforward to deal with if you've got a head as cool as Alex's.

What's more difficult is when his crew, his only crew, a woman he thought was solid for a few years at the very least, self-implodes in the Kos marina. "What are we doing here? What is life about? What does all this mean?" When you're caught out in an existential gale, even a cockpit with a hard top isn't going to give you enough shelter.  So for Alex, the relief when it blew over was much greater than the relief of having thought to buy two new blocks in Piraeus (just in case), and having a spare length of Spectra rope on board long enough to replace the shredded mainsheet.

Before normal broadcast resumes, a short explanation of where the gale came from. I'm not a hedonist by nature. I like working towards a goal,  I get a buzz out of achievement,  I enjoy the satisfaction of contributing to....well, whatever. My family, a better world. All very worthy stuff.  I think people now call this being engaged.  Living on a boat isn't a very good fit with any of the above.  It's the ultimate in disengagement, actually.

Doing lunch on the Kos quay

An Australian we met in Kos told me, neither originally, nor with any particular degree of insight, "we're about the journey not the destination" (his journey that day began in a hurry and almost ended when a mooring line tangled around his propeller). I'm more of a destination person. I'm trying to be a journey person, but I am off to a shaky start. Hoping to get steadier on my feet. To live on a boat as we're doing, you need to know that it's ok just to be happy. Period.  Live and let live. Do no harm. Sounds facile, doesn't it? To someone as conditioned as I am to justify my existence, it's as complicated as anything I've ever attempted.

Now this is complicated - a 55 ft X boat comes into Kos marina with a broken mast

Back to the journey.

Marina staff at Kos

We went to Kos from Patmos to check out of Greece. Now's the time to come clean on our visa status. Because of the delays in Port Napoleon, compounded by delays in Italy because of our engine troubles,  by the time we left Syracuse we had over-stayed our three-month Schengen visa. (For those who don't know about Schengen, it's an agreement which restricts non-EU nationals to staying in the zone - which covers almost all of Europe, excluding the UK and Croatia - to 90 days in every 180. It doesn't work very well for cruising yachts, but we're caught up in it like everyone else.)

Patrol boat on the quay at Kos

But families are what the summer is all about

5 Euros for 2 sunbeds - close of business

We weren't sure we'd be allowed into Greece, but as a Greek girl we met in Messina said, with a broad smile, "Ah, the Greeks won't worry". And sure enough,  they didn't.  In Zakinthos, no-one asked us any awkward questions, and we figured they were probably more interested in our custom then in keeping Brussels onside. Who knows. But just to be safe, we hurried through Greece.

Life in the slower lane

We stayed three nights at the Kos marina however. The gale stalled us, and we needed time to clean up, to reset the mood. We wandered into Kos which is full of beachgoers in August, but the bicycles and the bikinis, the beach toys and the big boys' toys don't detract from the splendour of the fortress built by the Knights of the Order of St John (the Crusaders) in the 16th century. They built another one across the water in Bodrum, and thus controlled the seaway. It survived a huge earthquake last century which toppled the remaining ruins of the Greek agora (market). 

The immigration office in Kos is on the quay where ferries come and go continuously between Turkey and Greece. We went there late in the day for an early departure the next morning, armed with paperwork to support our case. A Turkish girl was flirting with the boys behind the window. She had a pile of passports to be stamped, probably belonging to passengers on a gulet, a Turkish charter boat. She was smoking beneath the non-smoking sign.  The immigration officer who took our passports seemed to be on cruise control. He stamped one. Then he opened the second, and paused. He began flicking through the pages. "When did you come to Europe?". I answered truthfully, "In April." He paused again, then reached for his stamp. We took them casually, chatted to the boy next in the queue who told us his brother was emigrating next week to Perth. We didn't want to linger, but neither did we want to stick around. We were Out. Out of Greece. Out of Schengen. Off to Turkey and a clean start.

That's Turkey over there

And here we are, in a bay east of Bodrum called Cokertme, anchored the Turkish way i.e. with a line taken from the stern to the shore (that's a complicated manoeuvre, unless a small boy in a boat touting for your restaurant custom happens along to help you). We cleared in at Turgutreis, a big swanky marina with two out of three big power boats flying the Stars and Stripes, all registered in Delaware, which must be some kind of scam since they seem to be Turkish-owned.

Delaware Avenue

Made in Turkey - marina shopping

We've got our Turkish transit log safely tucked away with our yacht registration papers, and sorted ourselves yet again with local internet and phone connections. The weather is fine. No gale warnings. The barometer is steady, and humidity high. Time to get the kayak off the boat.