Paros to Patmos (or so we had planned anyway!)

May 29^th

At 5am the wind happened to be blowing at 30 knots.
So this was not really time to up-anchor. (The weather controls EVERYTHING!)

The forecast predicted the wind to subside to 15 knots by lunch time. So it was just a wait until we felt we could leave easily in not too much wind. By 9am the wind had dropped to 20 knots and so we up-anchored and left.

On our way out of the bay we heard a Mayday! Being so close to a warship with all it’s helicopters we didn’t feel the need to investigate further. Within another 30 minutes we saw a coast guard helping a yacht about 10 miles off shore. We are not sure what the problem was but it was well in hand as we passed.

The wind started to build again to 30 plus knots with a swell approaching 3 meters - what is it with these inaccurate weather forecasts! It is times like this that we are always mindful that ‘Timeless’ is designed to handle these conditions in it’s stride.  But this was yet another time when I was pleased with electric winches and in-mast furling.

At lunchtime the weather was as bad as ever and the sea conditions were still slowing us down as we lurched our way through the swell. The important point was that we were now getting tight for daylight hours to safely anchor in Patmos. Additionally, there were two large rocks (almost islands) in the middle of a channel between other bigger islands on our course. The net result was a weird current.  Although we had more than enough wind for confident sailing the leeway was silly. For safety sake we put the engine on and powered through the channel. John hates putting the engine ON during a sail but it was prudent and it did charge the batteries up!

Night time was closing in. We did arrive at a possible anchorage just after dark but the wind was still 25 knots plus and even if we were to try setting the anchor in the dark we wouldn’t have slept soundly that night.

So decision time.
John said lets sail on to Turkey through the night and be in Turkey six days earlier than originally planned. 

Ok, so we didn’t really have a choice.
We carried on through the night.

The swell thankfully reduced now we were the other side of the island. The swell can be really tiring! We had a fairly tricky navigation (for the dark) around some more islands before we would hit open water again.  The wind was clearly swirling around the islands requiring constant sail trim. Les left John to do the hard work and went down to get some shut eye.

Once we had passed the islands Les took over the helm and let John get some well-earned sleep!  We still had 4 hours before daybreak (more than enough time to reach our destination). Les let John sleep and slowly moved along - we didn’t want to arrive in the dark or before the marina opened. At daybreak there was only 10 miles to go to Turgutreis, our destination for a few weeks whilst we were to explore Istanbul and parts of Turkey.  

We were still a little too early. We have a rule never to be broken - you NEVER leave the cockpit unless there is someone else in the cockpit with you.  We had entered Turkish waters, there was a Turkish coast guard taking a particular interest in us (or so we felt), we needed to hoist the Yellow flag up and raise the Turkish courtesy flag to be street legal. So John had to wake Les to come to the cockpit to allow him to do his job!

John had also found a nice little anchorage just before the marina that we could go to to get some sleep before entering the marina later in the day.  

That was not going to happen now (basically you are not allowed to anchor before checking in to a country).
The Turkish coast guard stayed on our starboard side taking a good look at us. So, John went up front on the deck to do the flags making sure he understood we were just arriving and Les stayed at the helm looking busy! 
Rules are rules.
The last thing we needed was to be arrested for not checking in on our first few hours in Turkey!

So, very tired we arrived at Turgutreis marina 6 ahead of planned and an hour before the staff  were due to arrive.