Thursday 23 May 2013

Time to go home

We fly home tomorrow for hospital, doctors, dentists and two long bike rides.
Last Friday, 17th May, we anchored in Bozuk Buku, ancient Loryma,
with the sad remnants of city walls at the head of the bay,
some lovely spring flowers


and the perfectly preserved enormous citadel on the headland.

We left early on Saturday morning and tied up at Captain's Table restaurant in Sogut, a very peaceful little place and very friendly restaurant.
On Sunday we motored across to Datca and anchored in the bay off the town. Someone passing in a dinghy warned us that 'a big blow' was coming. We thought he must have seen a different weather forecast from us so we decided that discretion was the better part of valour and spent the evening aboard. We decided that people who sail the Turkish coast have less experience of stronger winds and so think of what we would regard as normal winds in the Dodecanese as a big blow. In fact the wind dropped overnight. 
On Monday we motored back to Kocabahce and moored on the restaurant's jetty, which was full by 4 pm. Heaven knows what it is like in July and August!
It is a beautiful spot - only accessible by sea, which makes the restaurant rather expensive, with a big vegetable garden and animals roaming.
We had only motored about 30 hours and had to get towards 50 so that we could get the 50 hour service in before we left Marmaris, so we left Kocabahce on Tuesday morning to drive a long way round to a quiet anchorage in Marmaris Bay. We drove down the coast of Symi, then across to Rhodes. About mid-day we decided to turn back towards Marmaris and the new engine spluttered and died! We managed to get it started again and motored on, thinking maybe there had just been a bit of dirt in the fuel, but as we approached our anchorage a couple of hours later it died again and this time would start but die as soon as we sped up. I decided it must bea problem with the fuel feed pump so we decided to get back to the marina while we still had a good wind for sailing. We phoned Burak, who thought at first that we were teasing him - Yanmar's don't die! We sailed up to the entrance to Marmaris Bay, at which point the wind died, then went round onto the nose. We managed to start the engine and motored gingerly to the marina, where we got a comfortable inside berth. It turned out that it was a problem with the fuel feed pump. They had moved it to make room for the watermaker pump but had put it on the manifold, where it overheated (it was a very hot day). We had done 41 hours on the engine by now, which they reckoned was enough to do the service.
On Wednesday Simon spent the morning getting the outlet pipe off the aft heads, cleaning the limescale out of the seacock and fitting a new pipe. The old pipe was clearly completely blocked - so much so that nothing flowed out of it when it was disconnected, which was great for us but not so great for the binmen when they collected it from the rubbish bins! We are now spending the last couple of days cleaning, sorting out and tidying up and doing the endless little repairs that are always waiting to be done.

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