Monday 24^th May

Water Sports festival dominated the morning with a series of very unlikely team events that were organised by the live-aboard community for the rally. Since the rally is divided up into six groups anyway, forming the teams was easy and it was just a case of the group leaders press ganging the boats into joining in. Sarah and Lesley stepped up to take part in the ladies dinghy water polo and along with Kathy and Sarah (Limbara) in a second dinghy they won their entertaining and rather physical match to round off the mornings festivities.

The afternoon was really spent just hanging around waiting to set off on the overnight sail to Girne in Northern Cyprus. We had special instructions from the tour committee to please arrive ahead of the rally to help them with the docking arrangements as this was likely to be the hardest place of all to squeeze all the boats in. We were heading for the commercial port, where the government was going to clear out all fishing boats and other moored craft and halt some of the ferry services to the island for the duration of our stay. However with no wind forecast we were clearly going to be motoring most of the way and so knowing that we were due to arrive at 10.30am tomorrow morning, there was no point leaving Alanya until 6.00pm today.

We slipped our lines and were heading out into the bay bang on 6.00pm when our prop caught a large mass of wood and we thought for a moment that our trip was over. Fortunately the prop just splintered the timber and no damage was done and we continued on our way in a light breeze which allowed us to briefly sail, but mostly just meant we could motor sail on greatly reduced revs, thus conserving fuel.

As darkness fell, we were overtaken by one of the rally yachts (A Plus 2) who was motoring as well, but they were on a course that took them across our bows and far too close. Then as they swept across our front, we spotted the fishing line they were towing and drew their attention to it. Unbelievably they then shouted at us to alter course to avoid their line. International rules of the sea (rule 13) are very clear that the overtaking boat ALWAYS keeps clear, but despite being the ‘stand on’ boat we took action to avoid getting their line around our prop. However as soon as we tried to resume our course they again waved at us as their line was still very close to us. We have no idea why they failed to alter their course as required by the rules and this is a subject I will be taking up with them shortly. But ‘D minus’ is our new name for their boat!

The wind pretty much had died away now, but there was a long rolling sea left over from an earlier storm running broadside to our route, so all the boats had a long night rolling from side to side all the way.

We also discovered just after dark that our starboard navigation light had stopped working as well as our radar. We used our tricolour light at the top of the mast to replace the light and it was such a clear moonlit night that the radar was not essential.