Honor visits and it blows like stink

The meltemi arrived the same day Honor landed at Izmir airport for a week’s holiday onboard.  No chance of the gentle day sails with a lunch stop at anchor we’d planned when the forecast is showing northerly force 6&7 all week, day and night.  Luckily Honor’s not an ultra keen sailor so she doesn’t mind that the boat’s staying firmly tied up in Teos marina.


Party time - we’re invited to join fellow boat owners at a marina concert celebrating the start of summer.


Sigacik (with Seferihisar) is proud to be the only slow food town in Turkey. The snail, emblem of citta slow, is a must-see landmark.  But why is it bright pink?

After a couple of days sitting by the pool, or at the local beach getting a sand facial in the wind, we hired a car and did a circuit up the little Meander valley and back to Selcuk returning along the coast road to Teos.

Our locally produced guidebook recommended visiting Tire, a village in the little Meander valley. It turned out to be nondescript warren of alleys lined with stalls selling tin buckets, shoes and garish jewellery - with no sign of the ‘cultural assets’ and local handicrafts of felt, clogs and quilts promised in the guide’s effusive description.


After sampling the local grape sherbet and watching a weaver on his loom in an old hamam, we pressed on for lunch at Sirince, a hilltown perched above Selcuk. Much better.
Lunch on shady terrace at Sirince
Sirince

Another day saw us cooling off at Ramo beach, close to Cesme. Although it faced south away from the wind, loads of whitecaps surfed past offshore.


Our unreliable guidebook suggested visiting Urla on the way. The town is allegedly the oldest olive oil workshop in the world with ‘a very Aegean ambience’. But somehow we couldn’t quite bring ourselves to stop and see if it was true or not. We went to Alacati instead and watched hundreds of windsurfers blasting back and forth across the lagoon before heading back home. The wind’s still howling in the rigging - oh dear.
Enjoying a meal out on our last evening together

An easy downwind sail?

Our destination - Teos Marina, Sigacik
When people say that sailing in the Med is unrewarding, they probably have in mind a day like today. We started out from Cesme with a gentle northwesterly. That’s good, the wind’s behind the beam for a change. We hoist the mainsail and unroll the genoa and manage a few easy downhill miles until we reach the south end of the Chios channel where the wind dies. We roll up the genoa and turn on the engine to get round the corner. On the other side, we’re heading southeast along a pretty beach on the south side of the Cesme peninsula. In the lee of the land, the wind’s now a pretty lacklustre affair, sometimes puffing up, sometimes dying. We motor on. At least the tillerpilot is doing the steering for us.

After ten miles or so the wind gets up a bit from astern. We turn off the engine and unroll the genoa but it refuses to fill behind the main. We haul it over to the other side to see if it’ll fly there but that doesn’t work either. We don’t think it’s a good idea to pole it out as it’s a bitch to get back in when it starts to get gusty. We roll up the genoa and go on under the main alone. We fit the preventer to stop us gybing as we’re sailing dead downwind.  The tillerpilot can’t be relied on in these conditions, so we set up the Aries windvane. But the wind blowing off the land changes direction all the time and our course begins to look like a drunken spider’s. Not good when we’re trying to make Teke Burun, the next headland. Leighton takes the helm instead.

On the approach to Teke Burun we’re on a sleigh ride with 20 knots up our stern. It gets to be hard work hanging on to the tiller. Not worth setting the Aries again as we’re almost there. We undo the preventer and gybe round the point. After that it’s just 10 miles to go to Teos across Sigacik Korfezi. Past the point the wind dies. On goes the engine again. Take out the windvane and set the tillerpilot again.

Half way across the bay, a fresh breeze pipes up at 60 degrees off the bow. I pop my head out of the companionway and seeing the strength of the wind, I ease the mainsheet, prompting the tillerpilot to seize up.  Leighton, who’s been finessing the thing to steer properly since the point goes below in a huff. I hand steer. It’s a good sailing breeze, but it takes two to unroll the genny, and I don’t dare ask Leighton for his help.

As we near Teos, the GPS log registers 5000 nautical miles. We can’t remember if that’s since we set out from Plymouth, or since we left Ayamonte. Given that today we’ve only managed 34 miles in 8 hours, it represents many hundreds of hours of slow travel out on the water. What an achievement!
Cooling off by the marina swimming pool

Cherries in season at Seferihisar market

Leighton on the trail of old artefacts at the temple of Dionysus at ancient Teos

Ayvalik - Greek ghost town

After a week at anchor and still no sign of the southerly wind abating, we head for the Setur Ayvalik marina for the weekend to top up the water tanks and have a much needed shower before heading off to explore the town of Ayvalik.  

Smart waterfront properties on the way to Ayvalik















Before the establishment of the Turkish republic, the market town of Ayvalik was a prosperous place of tanneries, mills and factories. In its heyday 20,000 people, mostly Greeks, lived here, working in 22 olive oil factories, 30 soap factories and 80 mills. 600 ships docked at its little port every year. All this commerce came to a grinding halt when the forced population exchange of the 1920’s sent the town's Greek residents to live in Crete, and Turks from Crete, Lesvos and Macedonia arrived to settle in Ayvalik.



The town has never recaptured its former importance although much of the old architecture of the town still remains. The streets behind the quay are lined with boarded up stone warehouses and factories, some with faded Greek lettering still visible over the door. The newly arrived Turks added a minaret to the Greek Orthodox churches to convert them to mosques.

The cobbled streets are steep and narrow, overlooked by typical Greek and ottoman style houses, now decaying gently, many of them empty. There’s very little sign of the sort of gentrification and development that’s taken place in Alacati. We liked the fact that it’s still a working town with very few airs and graces.


We didn't want to disturb this guy's siesta so we lug our bags of fresh provisions back to the marina on foot instead.  When we head back to our anchorage on Monday, we think - just maybe  - we can head south on Thursday.

Getting hooked

Anchors are a bit like teenage sons. When they’re out of sight you have no idea what mischief they’re getting up to and your mind starts running over all sorts of ghastly outcomes if things go wrong. So when the wind gets up and the water’s too deep or murky to check that the anchor's properly hooked, we get ready for yet another sleepless night on anchor watch.
If only it was always this quiet at anchor....














 It blew 30 knots in our little anchorage in the Ayvalik archipelago one afternoon and all night. The couple on the only other yacht there had gone ashore when the wind got up. They got soaked getting back in their dinghy and no sooner were they onboard than their boat started to drag. When they hauled in their anchor it came up tangled in what looked like an old bike frame. We watched in horror as the wife struggled to control the boat to stop it from being swept sideways onto the shore while her husband in a fit of madness took to the dinghy to hack away the lump of scrap metal swinging beneath the bow.  As we watched the wind carry them out of the anchorage, we dreaded the thought of going through the same nightmare. 

As it turned out, we needn’t have worried - that time anyway. When we came to leave, the bugel took some lifting because it was stuck fast in the stickiest mud we’ve ever come across, even better than Vliho’s.  But the next time we came to leave……the anchor brought up with it a coil of thick rope - we think the remnants of some old mussel beds - still attached to the seabed. Thankfully it was easily sorted out, but you just never know with anchors - or with teenage boys for that matter.