It was a Tuesday morning when we first heard about the coming full lock down across Turkey. It would come into effect at 17:00 hours on Thursday.
At first we were told that the lock down would last for 3 weeks and no travel was allowed between provinces and as far as we could ascertain no movement was allowed between anchorages. We had decisions to make.
At first we began looking for an anchorage that offered the most amount of protection from wind and waves. But it also needed to be close enough to a town for grocery shopping via dinghy and it needed a good Internet signal. Not having accurate weather prediction that could tell us what to expect over the course of a few weeks meant that finding that safe anchorage was difficult. There were too many variables.
Our next idea was to sail 10 hours to the north and use 21 days of our 30 free days at Setur Kuşadasi marina. There it didn't matter what the weather did and we'd have the luxury of hot showers, toilet facilities and walking distance to a supermarket. That sounded like a plan until we received more information from our friends who began telling us of rumours that the lock down could be extended out to 6 weeks if the numbers of positive PCR tests weren't coming down to acceptable numbers after 3 weeks.
The thought of being unable to leave the marina after our 30 free days had been used up meant that we'd be spending money on marina fees that wasn't in our budget. The Kuşadasi marina plan was scrapped. At the same time the whole find a good safe anchorage plan was scrapped because 6 weeks at one anchorage would be too much.
The next plan was to get back to home base at Kaş marina. We could stay there as long as needed and have access to all of the aforementioned marina conveniences. That became our plan.
Getting home
Checking the 3 day weather forecast showed that the wind would generally not be doing anything helpful for the direction we wanted to travel. Luckily we were anchored at the small bay of Bahce Koyu in the bigger bay of Yalikavak and the marina there had a fuel berth so we'd be able to start our trip back to Kaş with a full fuel tank of 200 litres (52.8 gallons).
We'd scoped out the fuel berth the previous day when we went into town in our dinghy and it was an easy approach, tie up and fuel up.
Our approach to the fuel berth was perfect with the only hindrance being a charter yacht who had no clue how to come alongside. I'd watched him through binoculars as we came in and by the time we began our final approach he'd had three failed attempts.
A fuel guy came to take our lines and I could see him looking at us then looking at the charter guy and back to us. Just before Aannsha threw the first line he waved us off and indicated that we go into the slot directly in front of the fuel pumps.
This was an easy manoeuvre but as we'd put all of our fenders on the starboard side at water level height this now meant that Aannsha had to move half of the fenders to our port side and readjust them all to toe rail height. In hindsight I could've done a couple of lazy circles to give Aannsha more time but as we approached the slot I could see that they had lots of big bumper bars along the concrete wall so our fenders were of little consequence.
Safely tied in the slot we fuelled up, paid and reversed out. As we left, the charter yacht guy was still trying to come alongside, we had to give him points for perseverance.
The mad dash to Kaş
It was 12:50 hours Tuesday when we departed Yalikavak and we arrived at Knidos, our first anchorage, at 18:45 hours. It felt like a long day with all of the processing of information that had been coming in since early morning, making plans and changing plans and all of the mental juggling of where we'd be stopping along the way back to Kaş.
Safely anchored at Knidos, we had a quick and easy dinner and an early night because we'd be departing at 06:00 the following day for an expected 10 hour sail on day 2 of our mad dash to Kaş.
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