Bozcaada
Scott-Free’s blog
Steve & Chris
Tue 26 May 2009 15:29
39:50.2N
26:04.6E
Tuesday 26th May
2009
After a lie-in and a
leisurely breakfast we slipped our moorings at Ayvalik, fuelled up and set off
for Bozcaada, one of the few islands off the Turkish coast that is actually
Turkish. This was not a long passage, hence the late start, but we made
slow progress as we were beating into an
unexpected Westerley wind and took a long time to get to the Turkish
headland north of Lesvos. Once round the corner, of course, the wind
turned with us but we made better progress under yankee and staysail until the
wind died about 5 miles off Bozcaada. Unfortunately, it picked up again
almost immediately, but this time from the East, around 20 knots. The
problem with this was that we were heading for a harbour that is open to the
East. There was nothing else to do but go for it as by now it was dark and
getting late.
We arrived at
Bozcaada Limani at 2330 with the wind blowing right into the harbour. We
dropped the kedge over the stern and went bows to the quay, beam on to the
wind. The kedge then began to drag and we were unable to tighten the line,
which then posed us with quite a problem as the stern of the boat was slewing
sideways towards another boat. It was impossible to get the boat off again
in the wind - it would have ended up in damage to both us and other boats, so
the choice was to either pull the anchor up and take it out in the rib to reset
it, or to move along and tie up alongside another boat whose anchor was
doing its job. We went for the latter, and as there appeared to be noone
on the boat, we tied up to it and waited for the owner to
return.
We spent
a rocky night in this way, and woke to hear the guy next door motoring
out of his berth, having untied us first of course! He either returned to
his boat very quietly, or had been there all the time we were tramping all over
it! The wind had died in the night and we were now held by our shore
lines. As we now needed to re-anchor, we decided to leave and move on.
Unfortunately it meant we didn't see much of Bozcaada!