People with a delicate stomach may wish to skip over this blog.
We spent a few days in Leros marina, sitting out the high winds. Our guests, Sue and John, had to get back to Kos by Sunday evening for their late flight out back to the UK, which was the same flight on which our new guests, Tony and Rachelle, would be arriving. We needed to decide if we would sail to Kos, else ask our friends to get on a ferry (yes, obviously not the same one, I’m not that stupid).
The forecast was looking great for Sunday, so we decided to sail down. Poor Sue and John had to be up very early for me to get their bed linen and towels through the wash before we left, and Sue very kindly cleaned their en-suite. We were set.
It's lovely to see friends, and it’s always sad to see people leave, but we usually try to leave longer than a few hours between these events. But it all worked out very well.
We spent a day wandering around Kos town with Tony and Rachelle [Ed, ancient Roman town ruins – excavated by the Italians; Turkish mosque and minaret; the Plane of Hippocrates; and the fort of the Knights of St John]. We set out on the Tuesday morning to the island of Nisiros, where all four of us had sailed to back in 2019.
Rod and Lu Heikell’s Greek Sailing pilot warns you that the entrance to Nisiros harbour can silt up, and recent reports on sailing social media report depths of 2m. We draw 2.2m, so would we ground in the entrance? It has a sandy bottom, but it might be a bit embarrassing. Apparently, a boat had run to ground there earlier in the year, and a local taverna owner had to go out in his dinghy and get them off!
I rang the taverna owner. George told us we should be ok, and we could moor up in front of his restaurant. Of course, we could 😊. Richard inched in, with Tony reading out the depth readings, gingerly waiting for that first bumping noise. I was on the bow keeping a watch but it was too murky to see anything, including the bottom. But we got through with 60cm under the keel. When Richard was a sailing instructor, he used to get students to ground a boat on a rising tide for them to see how then to get off. But a rising tide on the Isle of Wight is a far cry from a Greek harbour with little tide. [Ed – I think we entered at nearly high water, anyway, which gave us about 30cm.]
Skipper hired a car for the afternoon and dragged us all up to a massive volcano crater [Ed - The 5th of our trip, I believe] and to some pretty chora – or hilltop villages – such as Nikia.
Retracing our route from 2019, our next stop was Tilos, with a magical night at anchor in an open bay on the north-west corner, only tenable because we had light winds from the south for a change.
All too soon, we were in Symi, getting ready to check out of Greece. Turkey beckoned just across the water, and we needed to get Missy Bear there to exit the EU, as our temporary export licence (TIL) would expire in a few weeks. In my role as Passepartout, I had found agents in Greece and Turkey to check us (and Missy Bear) out of one country and in to the other. It was absolutely seamless, and many thanks to my ex-work colleague and sailor, Richard Gleed, for the contact names.
We checked into Turkey in a small town called Bozburun. It’s only a couple of hours sail away from Symi, and is a popular place for these transactions. We spotted a perfect spot on the quayside, just in front of the main restaurant, between another UK flagged boat and a small fishing boat. Once we moored up, we realised why it was free – a waste pipe empties into the harbour at this point.
Now for a little story at 'Poo corner'… boats in the Mediterranean are obliged to have holding tanks: you flush the loo by pumping salt water in to the bowl, and then pump out the waste into these tanks. In some countries (e.g., Greece and Turkey), you also have to have a separate bin for loo paper.
Now in Greece, you get a certain number of miles off the coast and you open the holding tanks, whereupon all the waste matter in the tanks comes flooding out in a long stream behind the stern. (It is visible and often very smelly, and everyone always turns automatically and quizzically to study the contents.) But, Turkey goes a stage further. You are not allowed to release holding tanks into the open sea. Instead, you have to get your waste tanks pumped out at an approved waste station. When you check in for the first time in Turkey, you get issued with a ‘blue card’ with a QR code, which is scanned, and records the date of pump-out for your vessel into a central system (called the Maritime Sewage System (MSS)). But there are very few pumping out stations. Some harbours have a station, but if it doesn’t work, they will take your money and award you a pump-out update, but the authorities are trying to stamp that out.
We had literally just arrived in Bozburun, and Gurkhan - our Turkish agent - had checked us in, and was standing on the quay telling us that he had all our paperwork. He was about to step aboard when the English couple on the next boat waylaid him, and with no ‘please’, ‘thank you’ or ‘excuse-me’ (as Rabbit would say in the House at Pooh Corner), just started grilling him on nearby pumping stations and phone numbers. I was speechless – we’re paying our agent to help us and these Brits had just butted in. Richard, who recovered more quickly than me, asks them firmly to wait until we’ve finished our business (no pun intended). And to be fair to Gurkhan, he later provided them with a number, and off they went.
The MSS allows you fourteen days between pump-outs. Friends of ours who have been in Turkey all summer told me that they have been in anchorages when a coastguard vessel turned up, and made a beeline for specific boats. They have always managed to stay within the two-week period, but the coastguards know who have/have not and target them. The fine can be in the thousands of Euros.
Together with Tony and Rachelle, we spent a very pleasant week pottering eastwards along the south-west corner of Turkey, resting in little bays and anchorages. Many of these bays have restaurants, who will pay for a jetty where you can moor up, and you are expected to eat at the restaurant. We have had a few nights at these places, and have also anchored up for a couple of nights as well.
Interestingly, our current anchorage had a visit from a waste pump vessel yesterday who chugged around, tooting cheerfully for business (no pun intended here either). Later on, a floating ice cream vendor motored by. To top it all, a huge Migros supermarket vessel also came into the anchorage. It did occur to me that in the natural order of things, the supermarket boat should have arrived first.
We are about to head into Gocek marina (D-Marin) later this morning. This has been the destination we have been heading for on Missy Bear since we first left Canet-en-Rousillon in July last year.
And Gocek itself will be the subject for another blog…