After the fun we had on last year’s EMYR (Eastern Med Yacht Rally), we had talked with several other boats this past winter about doing our own Black Sea Rally (BSR). There were going to be 6 – 8 boats and we were all to meet in
There was only one other boat there, an English couple on a catamaran called Taralee. We waited around The Bull for another day, and then the two of us decided to go up the Bosphorus and stick our nose in the
This famous narrow waterway connects
As we left The Bull, there were about 30 to 50 tankers and freighters just anchored in the water, waiting. We hypothesize that these ships are empty and waiting for someone to call them to haul goods. It’s a bit of a strange sight seeing all these boats just sitting idle. As we worked our way up from the Atakoy Marina on the south side of European Istanbul, we had to carefully thread our way between these freighters while avoiding the many fast ferries darting back and forth between the Europe and
Passing the Golden Horn of old
Once north of the city, the parade of mosques, castles and fabulous period homes was incredible. A truly memorable journey.
[Cruising Notes]
Atakoy Marina is expensive with a minimum charge of 60 € per day plus electricity and water. It is crowded and difficult to get in. They would not let Taralee (catamaran) in at all. She had to spend 4 nights at anchor in the bay south of the marina. This bay is OK with good holding (mud) except during a south wind when a sewer outfall will cast a considerable aroma and make dinner a little less appetizing. One big problem was that Atakoy Marina would not let Taralee land their dingy in the marina to come ashore, so it was a big hassle for them. There is no other evident place to take a dingy ashore from this anchorage. Everything is fenced off.
The Bosphorus and
This is the last town, more like a village on the Asian side the Bosporus just before entering the
The water was very clear and the village had two boats patrolling the harbor and local boys picking up trash. They even came by the anchored boats and picked up any garbage we had on board. With the water so clear, lots of local kids were swimming and frolicking in the water and on the beach. Four sailboats were anchored in the harbor and we knew all of them from last year’s EMYR, although only Taralee and ourselves were part of the Coalition. The other two boats, Alexina and Venus were on independent B.S. expeditions. When Alexina told their insurance company they were thinking of going to the
In the evening we would take our dingy over to our buddy boat, Taralee, pick them up, then head in for dinner. There are about 4 restaurants in town by the bay and all had “hawkers” out front, trying to get us to come in to their restaurant. We settled down at one restaurant and only had beer and an appetizer plate but got the high season price of about $70. It’s really irritating when that happens, which seems to be fairly frequently but it is a little on the difficult side for us to argue about it in Turkish. So we grin and bear it. The cheese appetizers were excellent though.
On the plus side these little towns seem to have pretty good fruits and vegetables (except bananas.).As we were having drinks at one taverna, a truck came by blowing his horn. Last truck like that had cages full of live chickens for sale. Talk about fresh meat! This truck was selling fresh strawberries. There was a big pile of them on a flatbed truck. The “grocer” took a shovel full and put them in a bag for us. I think it was about $.80. They were so fresh in fact, that they had a shelf life of less than a day. But they were great and we made sure they didn’t last long. Kind of makes up for the high restaurant bill.
Our Coalition hadn’t showed up yet so we, along with Taralee decided to move on to the next port Sile ( pronounced Sheelay).
[Cruising Notes] The harbor has room for at least 8-10 boats at anchor. Probably a couple of more against the wall. Town is very small. A couple of small grocers at the top of the hill. Might be a place to explore
This is the first town where we began to appreciate the “real”
Since we still are involved in running a company back home, we spend a considerable amount of time just trying to stay “connected”. This year we brought a BlackBerry. We highly recommend this device as it just works, everywhere and all the time for email. The only drawback is that our business requires looking at a lot of attachments, and for that we need to connect our laptops. We have an industrial WIFI antenna on board that lets us connect to open WIFI stations, often at considerable distance.
In this port we saw about 8 possible WIFI stations, but all were “encoded”. This is not normally a problem, because each station is named and they are often name after a local restaurant or hotel. You can then patronize the restaurant, and they will give you their codes to use.
We wrote the station names down, then went into town looking for those restaurants. However, this town was strange. The Paradise Restaurant didn’t know they had a WIFI. Same story with two other restaurants we had identified on the station list. It was a bit odd but may have something to do with our very limited Turkish.
We finally ended up going into internet cafes where all the boys are planning video games. Everyone over 50 years old should spend an hour in an internet café. You can pretend to be doing your own business on the computer, but it’s fascinating (and scary) to see what these kids are doing.) One older brother (age 14) was teaching his little brother (age 8) how to do a particular violent game. The little boy wasn’t so good at driving the villain on the motorcycle. He kept running him into cement walls, and then the character would pick himself up, dust off and get back on the motorcycle. Within a minute, he would be picking himself up again after hitting another cement wall. Talk about invincible! Sometimes he would steal someone else’s motorcycle or would kill another rider. It certainly didn’t faze the little boy. He kept the guy moving pretty fast. At one particularly frustrating point in the game when his character crashed for the umptheenth time, we heard this cute little 8 year old boy exclaim “God Dammit!” Ah, video games teaching the best of English around the world.
For two days, the kid at the internet café refused to take any money from us for plugging in our laptops. Finally, on the third day, I forced him to take 10 lira from us. It was probably overpaying for what we used, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
One of the shopping highlights in Sile was finding peanut butter in a grocery store. It may not seem like a big thing to you, but we have never seen peanut butter in a Turkish store – and we were about out! We also found a bottle of curry sauce at the meat market so we were pretty excited with these two small purchases. That’s the fun and challenge of traveling. Sometimes things as simple as apples are very difficult to find. We spent time last year trying to find hot chocolate mix that you only need to mix with water and never could found any.
[Cruising Notes] There were 4 cruising boats in the harbor when we were there. We docked alongside the quay along with Taralee. Two other boats were Med moored. In hindsight, we should have also Med Moored as we probably took a place of one of the fishing boats trying to unload their catch at the end of the day. No one said anything and the fishermen were quite polite. There are a couple of larger grocery stores in town. Sile is a good place for provisioning. Did not find water or electricity on the dock, but water may have been available considering the amount of development in the area.