Friday 28^th May

Fairly chaotic morning mostly taken up with the minutiae of paperwork and getting ready to sail to Mersin in Turkey overnight.

Trevor and Lesley used the car to run various people to the supermarket for supplies and covert bacon runs!

We had to exchange our shore passes and get our passports back in return and various briefings took place so everyone was clear on how we were going to be docking the next morning when we arrived.

But the main focus of attention was the plan, or rather the absence of a plan for all the boats to refuel. The price of fuel here is very low indeed and so everyone had left their fuelling until we arrived here, unfortunately when we arrived the fuel barge was not operational and it seems that road tankers were not allow to fill boats in the commercial harbour where we were. Deputy Dog (real boat name is Salty Dog) which is a large Nordhaven motor yacht had negotiated an exclusion to this rule as he needed 4500 litres, but the rest of us needed to queue up as we left the harbour and fill at the fuel station. This whole idea was fraught with problems as it takes an age to fuel 70 odd boats and the small ones that needed to leave first to make the 108 mile sail to Mersin, were hemmed in by larger boats that did not need to leave yet. This process was further complicated by several boats getting their anchors snagged on a major underwater obstruction. This blocked a group of boats and in the efforts to free the snagged anchors, one boat lost its anchor altogether when its swivel link snapped under the load. One of the remaining boats had diving gear on board and was able to release the trapped boats, but the missing anchor was never found.

As it all turned out, our group was the second last to fuel and so we sat around all afternoon and finally got under way around 5.00pm, heading out into a very flat sea with only a light breeze blowing directly on the nose.

As darkness fell we switched on our lights and we delighted to see that the starboard nav light was fine still, but the radar only lasted an hour or so before going on strike again. This was a bit of a concern as light fog had descended reducing visibility to only a mile and with so many yachts ahead of us we needed all the help we could get. Usual array of unlikely and quite illegal lights were on display ahead as various nationalities flouted the rules, mostly due to complete ignorance I am sorry to report. One French boat stopped dead to recover a large tuna they had caught, but since they had not bothered to put their lights on in the first place, they soon became a serious hazard! However all was well and mostly we were just jealous that we had not caught a fish ourselves!