The town of Girne looks similar to the Greek Island of Hydra or French port of Honfleur – lots of restaurants gathered around the old harbor. Our group was split between two harbors. The small boats got to moor 3 – 4 deep in the old harbor while the bigger boats were in the new harbor. They had to take buses back and forth so we got the better deal, except we had to crawl over three other boats to get to shore. Both groups congregated in the old harbor in our pirate garb for the annual EMYR Pirate’s Party. All the flags of the countries represented in the EMYR also joined in as the pirates roamed through town searching for a hotel offering a pirate’s feast.
It was a wild group of pirates. I had brought Steve’s unruly parrot along. Steve had searched the internet for a “salty” parrot. It was the only talking parrot in the group. It was amazing to see how big people’s eyes got when they heard what Steve’s parrot had to say. I mean, they were expecting him to say something mellow like “Polly want a cracker?” but instead Mr. Parrot had way more to say than that. People still come up to me and ask to hear the parrot again, so we may have to give him another outing.
I should mention a little about the flags. We have 16 or 17 different countries represented in the rally. At certain parties we have a flag ceremony where one representative from that country says in their own language as they present the flag something like “we love your country and the people of America pray we can all live together in peace.” It’s a colorful ceremony. My turn for the flag ceremony is coming up sometime soon. A guy from Florida is the flag man so I will let you know if and when it happens.
That night at the pirate’s party we were treated with Greeks and Turkish dancers dancing together. Because of the problems in Cyprus between the two countries, it’s pretty special that they put aside their differences to dance together. After that we had “pirate dancing.” It turns out we have a couple on the rally that could easily win the “Dancing with the Stars” competition. We keep hoping they will give us lessons. Rumor has it that it will happen in the next port. One of the gals in the rally came as “pirate booty.” She was dressed in belly dancing garb and had quite a time dancing around with all the pirates. To our surprise, then a “real” Turkish belly dancer came and danced. She was definitely impressive. After wooing the crowd, then she and the pirate’s belly dancer danced together! It was a fun night.
This was another 18 hour journey if you make 6 knots. Our scheduled arrival time was noon. We had planned to leave at 6 p.m. but there was a question of getting gas (really cheap in Cyprus) so our group had to head over to the gas dock at noon. I had a good landing at the gas dock, but things went south coming off the dock due to the wind and another boat at the other side of the dock. Unfortunately the entire fleet witnessed the event. As one gal said, “we all held our breath, and I think that made you 10 cms lighter so you missed the cement bottom” (where they drive in to launch boats.) Anyway – it was a bit ugly and Paul from New Dawn had been there to help me with the lines so I was a bit upset and embarrassed. In fact, the whole next night I had nightmares about it. Oh well, next time I won’t panic.
Even though the internet is not dependable, it’s amazing the cellphone coverage we have been having. Steve and I have been constantly sending “text messages” back and forth. Whenever I had questions about something I could text him and usually the answer would come back quickly. Unfortunately, on the night passage to Mersin, when I turned on the radar it said “scanner not responding” and we were too far away from shore to send a text message to Steve..
That error message was definitely not good news because watching for other boats on radar really gives me lots of confidence during the night watches. Without the radar, all you can do is look out in the dark and try to see what boat might be coming towards you. So, to try to solve this problem I could hear Steve say, “get out of the car and try it again.” So, my first plan of attack was to unplug all the plugs on the chart plotter/ radar screen and re-plug them all back in. Good try but it didn’t solve the problem. Next I turned off all the switches down below on the electric panel except the GPS. That turned off the autopilot so we had to manually steer as we tried that solution. Again, no luck. Final try was to reboot the GPS downstairs. That’s a bit scary to do as turning off the GPS switch seems like cutting the umbilical cord. Without the GPS, it’s a whole different ballgame. The autopilot won’t work so you’re back to sailing the way they used to sail when Captain Cook sailed the ocean blue. This was not a comforting thought. I turned off the GPS switch on the panel then quickly flipped it back on. Absolutely nothing happened. As I stared in disbelief at the unresponsive GPS machine, I slowly realized it had another on/ off switch in addition to the one on the main electrical panel. I pushed that button and slowly the system started searching for satellites until the gauge gave the comforting GPS data we’re used to seeing. I quickly went upstairs and rebooted the Chart Plotter/ Radar machine and was delighted to see the radar now had its “fix!” Things were looking up! We had made it through another crisis. I was starting to feel like the real “captain!”
As we got close to Mersin, I text messaged Stephanie about our arrival time. She texted back to say she and Stellen would be at the docks, but the “harbor” seemed really small. Naturally that added to my anxiety for the upcoming landing. Prior to each departure, we have “Captain’s Meetings” with our group leaders. They give us the highlights for the upcoming harbor and things to worry about for the next 18 hours before landing in the harbor. They told us Mersin was a very busy harbor and there was no space to anchor outside the harbor so we had to arrive on time and not early. Also, because we never checked out of Turkey to go to Cyprus, we didn’t need the yellow quarantine flag to signify we were new to the country and didn’t need to “sign in with customs.”
They had 5 boats circle around outside the harbor for about 45 minutes even though we had arrived “on time.” Then, they said for all 5 of us to come in at the same time. That seemed very strange. If this is such a small harbor, why would they want all 5 of us to try to land our boats at the same time? I decided I didn’t want to follow too closely behind the boat in front. I wanted them to have plenty of time to land.
As it turned out, the harbor wasn’t that small and we actually got to tie up next to the dock so it was an easy landing of Sugilite: come in very slowly, do a big circle to get the boat heading out so the take-off would be easy, then slide along the dock and tie up. Mersin even had their navy standing by on the docks to catch our lines. It was pretty cool and the guys were a welcomed sight!
Stephanie and Stellen immediately came down the dock as we landed. She had met him in Egypt, and then last week had flown to Sweden to meet his parents. Seemed the relationship was progressing pretty quickly if it was “meet the parents” time.
Anyway, that first night we had a great “casual cocktail party” at a sports complex. The event turned out to be all the free food and drinks you wanted. I think both Steph and Stellen were quite impressed.
Next day we did a tour of the fortresses and ruins around Mercin while Stephanie and Stellen explored Mersin. That night was the formal dinner party on the beach so this time we dressed up for the event (men in ties and sports coats, women in dresses or fancy clothes.) They gave us a really neat box with the boat’s name on it. Inside were some Turkish cookies but no one on board wanted more than one cookie.
Next day at 5:30 p.m. we set sail for Iskenderun. This is the last Turkish port before Syria. This was a 13 hour sail if you averaged 6 knots or a 16 hour sail if you averaged 5 knots. You never can really tell what’s going to happen. We had times of 6+ knots and lots of hours at 3+ knots. As we got close to the end of the trip we would see the number of miles left then decide if the engine was needed to get us there on time. Usually, the answer was YES!!! We like the engine option. Unfortunately, after dinner Stellen went to bed and didn’t come out of the V berth the entire trip. We took that as not a good sign.
When we got to Iskenderun, the “port” was a bit of a misnomer. We anchored 4 deep against a cement wall. There were no facilities, no water and 70 some boats all tried to plug into about 10 outlets. Things were a bit depressing at this point.
However, in spite of that, we started hearing lots of people yelling for us to join them. Seems that in spite of the warnings that this was not a great marine, someone had decided to do an “all-rally swim” and everyone was swimming in the water behind the boats. I had some shorts on that I was going to wash anyway so just jumped in. We swam from boat to boat trying to get them to also jump in and swim with us. We got about 80% participation. Our favorite Brits sailing in our group sternly told us they NEVER SWIM IN HARBORS, especially THIS HARBOR. After the group swim, I swam around the boat with a sponge to clean off anything that might be growing on the bottom but things looked very clean. Stellan kept swimming from boat to boat, and, we started worrying when he hadn’t come back after two hours. Seems he got invited onto a boat for a few beers and was having a great time meeting the other yachties. Stephanie was pretty mad he didn’t come get her..
Our “Captain’s Meeting” centered around collecting for our boat everyone’s passport, 3 copies of our crewlist and the boat’s Turkish papers. I had to give them to the passport people on the dock. We gathered everything up and then I spent about a half hour with the guy trying to get all the forms properly filled out: deleting Steve’s name from the ships papers and adding Stellen’s. Finally that was all done and I gave it all to the custom’s man. He would then take it somewhere and process every ship’s bag of documents and we would get them back before we left the next morning.
After getting back to the boat, we had lunch and started talking about the potluck for that evening’s dinner. Then the conversation turned to the fact that Stellen had just decided he was not going to sail with us any more and would leave the next day. Good timing! Now I had to go find the customs guy again and retrieve our ships papers and take Stellen’s name off the 3 copies of the crewlist and retrieve his passport so he could leave. The custom’s man had stored everyone’s ship’s bag in his trunk so we had to find the Group Two box and the Sugilite bag to make these changes. Such a deal. So that was the end of Stellen’s sailing career! He left the next day.
At the Captain’s meeting, they said the weather would be “tutti fruiti.” I think that’s German for they don’t know what the weather will be. Gunter (Ursula’s husband) also said he didn’t like Sugilite’s flags and that he didn’t think we should have country flags flying in the Syria harbor as we might offend someone. I was a bit miffed at that so Lee and I pondered how we could change our flags. We thought maybe we would just re-tie them and only have one line of flags that were non-country flags. We had taken the flags of all the countries we had visited in the last four years and added a couple of Screamer Sharkie flags. We fly these decorative flags when we are in the different harbors. It dresses up the boats and makes everything very festive.
We stayed around Iskenderun for awhile and practiced Med Mooring in areas where there weren’t any boats. After four tries, I was feeling more confident as we expected that was how we were to anchor in Syria. We headed out of the harbor at 6:15 that night. At about 7 p.m. we decided to check the engine’s dials on the steering column. We were shocked to see all four gauges had no readings! The engine was running but the dials weren’t registering anything. I tried flipping all the levers on the electrical panel but doubted that would work. It didn’t. I sent Steve a text message to call ASAP. In the meantime, we decided to turn off the motor and then hope it would restart. Luck was with us! It restarted and then all four gauges had readings. Steve called and said that somehow the key to the engine hadn’t been turned all the way on. It was turned on enough to start the engine but not the gauges. It was a spooky feeling and a bad start to the overnight trip.
The trip to Syria never got much better. It was very hard because the wind was on the head and we tossed and turned. It was impossible to sleep when not on watch so everyone was very tired. Stephanie was trying to be sick but had nothing in her stomach by that time so just felt awful all the way.
Because Iskenderun is at the far eastern end of the Med, all the plastic bags that end up in the Med seemed to congregate in that area. Three boats got plastic wrapped around their propellers. It either killed their engines or greatly reduced their speed. Another boat in a different group had other engine problems and, after 18 miles, had to turn around and head back to Iskenderun. We headed further off-shore in hopes of staying away from the floating plastic bags. Our friends in the boat, Joy, ended up towing one of the Group 2 boats most of the way to Syria.
Just before dawn, we had three different flashes of light, but no thunder. We all were wondering if it was lightning - or something else. The next morning we heard Joy on the radio alerting all boats in our area of a water spout. I looked over to where she had pointed and, sure enough, here was a “tornado-like” funnel reaching down from the sky. Below it I could see the water being pulled up towards the funnel. I remembered reading about these in Dashell’s Bad Weather Sailing Bible. Seeing the real thing looked worst than I remembered reading about. We immediately looked to see which way it was traveling and checked to see how much sail we had out. When it became clear it was not coming our way, we relaxed and just watched it for the next ten minutes until it dissipated.
We had marked on our chart where we would cross the border into Syrian waters. We had been instructed to call up the Syrian Navy and tell them our boat name and number the GPS coordinates of where we were crossing into Syrian waters. The Syrian Navy never answered any boat, but we all announced to them that we were now in their waters.
We had been told to stay at least 6 nautical miles off their coast and were given a specific GPS point to sail to. At that point we could turn east and sail into the harbor of Lattakia Our instructions admonished, “It is strictly forbidden to sail closer than 6 nm to the Syrian coast and accurate navigation is essential. Do not cut the corner at the final waypoint.”
Everyone was a bit tense entering the harbor. Gunter (Ursula’s husband) was signaling for us to land bow to between their boat and the next boat. We did that but then found the chain of the other boat was rubbing on our hull. I told Gunter it was not an acceptable place to anchor. He kept telling me it was fine. I kept saying it was no good. This went back and forth a few more times and Gunter got a bit animated and then lost his balance and fell into the water. Then we all decided I would move the boat further down and go bow to and use the 2nd anchor to hold the back of the boat out. We haven’t seen Gunter since our docking experience. The other boats in our group agreed with me that I should have moved. I also checked with New Dawn and he totally agreed that I had done the right thing. So, we’re happily resting in our new location and probably won’t see Gunter until our next Captain’s meeting for Lebanon. We decided not to fly any flags in the marina, letting Gunter win that one. Besides, it would have been too much of a hassle retying all those flags.
We all had signed up for the 2 day tour to Damascus. First we toured the Kraqk Des Chevaliers, a great Crusader’s castle then drove on to tour the ruins at Palmyra. Its time for bed so more about this later! It was great and we totally love Syria and feel very safe here.