Muskrat - 36:41.43N 28:02.52E

36:41.43N 28:02.52E

Muskrat

Chris and Alison

Tue 3 May 2022 16:31

We finally made it out of Greece. All the horror stories we had heard about checking out of Greece from Rhodes did not come fruition, the officials could not have been more cheerful, helpful and efficient. It was all completed in less than half an hour and we even shared a joke with the customs officer, then we were clear to leave Greece and make our way to Turkey. Now the Greek Schengen clock has stopped but the Turkish one has started. What we want to avoid is to have to return to Greece with only a few days left in the month because then we will have to pay for a whole months cruising tax for only a couple of days. The other problem is that the Greek Schengen days do not start dropping off until 6 months have elapsed, so if we want to stay until November we will have to be a bit cleaver when the schengen time is up in Turkey but it is too early to enter Greece.

As we left Greece there was an orange haze to the sky and it wasn’t long before my lovely clean Muskrat was completely covered in orange sand. It got everywhere again, in the ropes in the winches in our lungs and to make matters worse we were heading to Turkey where washing the decks and any sort of cleaning that puts anything into the sea is forbidden, making washing down the decks difficult as you are likely to be reported to the coastguard even if you haven’t used any chemicals. We made our way to Bozburun, motoring most of way in this horrible orange haze, only managing to get the sails up for a short while until the wind completely went again. We had arranged an agent, as advised, to help us with clearance into Turkey and by the time we got there he had most of our information and had done most of the work. All we had to do was to get our Passports stamped and he did the rest, all over in less than half an hour again, then we had to pay him by cash in Euros!

We decided to anchor for the first night in an anchorage planning to come alongside the next morning to arrange our “poo paper” aka the Blue Card. This card is stamped every time you have a pump out of black and grey water to prove that you are not pumping black water into the sea. In theory a really good idea and one that I would fully support. In reality, in a lot of the areas, the infrastructure is not in place for this to happen, so our first stamp on our blue card said we had been pumped out but as there was no infrastructure to physically do this we essentially paid for a virtual pump out! Welcome to Turkey.

With the formalities completely we made our way to the anchorage and settled in for the night. The first part of the night was a bit windy, but the anchor held despite not being able to put out our preferred length of chain because it was a very small anchorage and there were other yachts around us, the sailing season has started, we are no longer on our own in anchorages.

The next day we got alongside early in the small harbour, stern to the quay (Chris is getting quite proficient at this now) and paid for 2 nights to ride out some nasty weather that is forecast before moving on towards Marmaris. Bozburun is wall to wall with Gulets waiting for the summer tourist to flock into Turkey. Apparently we have about 5 weeks of sailing until these huge boats set off and take up a lot of the anchorages and berths, oh well it was nice while it lasted.