36:49.05N 28:18.3E

05 October onwards

Once again our season ended rather suddenly although only about a week early, rather than 3 months early as it did last year. This time it was the anchor motor that came to grief rather than Mike.  Died completely part way down as we were backing into a space on the quay in the small harbour on the Greek island of Simi.  You can’t simply stop the yacht because as soon as you take the power off the wind, tide or both will get hold of it and off she goes in the direction of her choice rather than ours.  Not helpful in a busy harbour so we kept going into the space between two other boats knowing that at least they would hold us temporarily while we looked at the anchor.  Couldn’t budge the motor so back out we go, Mike pulling it up by hand, get out the kedge anchor, drop that by hand over the back as we go in to the quay bows to.  All a bit physical.

The only reason we had gone to Simi was to check both us and Tashi Delek out of Greece so we only needed to stay a couple of hours.  You wouldn’t really expect it to take that long except that the Port Police are on one side of the harbour so you go there to get the paperwork stamped, then you have to go to Immigration which is all the way round on the other side of the harbour.  When you get there you find another policeman who checks passports, writes your name in another big book and fills out a form.  You then take that form all the way round the harbour back to the Port Police who complete their paperwork which luckily they then send to Customs.  The various scruffy offices are crammed full of stuff including a television that is invariably on and loud so you don’t get the sense that there is anything slick about the operation.  The stuff crammed onto the desks includes flat screen computers and other gadgets so there seems to be plenty of technology around, it just isn’t used.  Chaos.

That done, Mike pulls up the kedge anchor again by hand and we head back to Turkey.  We are both far too old and fragile of spine to be manually pulling up anchors so we came back to Marmaris to have the motor looked at.  

First, get the motor out.  This involved wrestling aged and somewhat rusty nuts and bolts in the confined space of the anchor chain locker.  Carol does this bit because she folds up into the limited space more easily.  Although we service the windlass each year that only requires dismantling the rollers that you can see on deck, we haven’t dismantled the motor from its casing underneath before and it was a bit of a puzzle because it hadn’t been fitted in quite the way it looked in the instructions. 

Then take it into the repair shop. 

They took it to pieces and found that the bearing had gone, one of the bobbins wasn’t working and it was unbalanced.  We went back the next day and they hooked it up to a battery to test it.  It whirred and buzzed mightily in both directions so we were delighted.  The mechanic was not so delighted and patiently explained that there was still a problem.  He demonstrated again and, sure enough, there was a slight difference in tone.   Long story short is that the motor stayed in intensive care for a couple more days while the mechanic tried to find the problem.  This included going across town to the industrial estate to look for parts.  In the end nothing could be done other than to attempt to rewind the copper coil.  The owner was willing to do this but said it would take two days; he could not guarantee that it would fix the problem and it would cost 200 Euros.  He was quite keen that we should buy a new motor!  The old one will work but for how long we don’t know so really it is only sensible to use it as back up.  We asked how much we owed him and he said nothing!  We insisted that we at least pay the £30 he had originally quoted and he was dismayed saying that that was the price for fixing it and they hadn’t fixed it.  They had actually spent way more time on trying to fix it than they had originally quoted so we were expecting to pay more not less and certainly not nothing at all.  In the end we just gave him the money and he gave some of it back.  Remarkable and we kind of hope that we need another motor fixing sometime soon so that we can take him some more business.

A bit of good news is that we can buy a replacement motor for not as much as we thought.  Phew.  Usually everything costs twice as much as we expect.

So, decision made to call it a day and stay here.  We have a lot to do so it will take some pressure off getting through everything before we fly home on the 27^th.