I thought I'd just give everyone interested a flavour of where we'll be for couple of weeks from 12th May!
There's a map below which shows the sailing area we'll be covering - basically we leave Marmaris on the far right of the map and wiggle around the coast of Turkey and end up at the Sunsail base at Turgutreis which is marked on the map by the small Sunsail logo to the west of Bodrum; if you click on the map you'll get a closer view of the whole sailing area.
Generally hugging the coastline, our route will take us southwest from Marmaris and after the end of the peninsular, you'll see the lovely Greek island of Simi which we have to give a wide berth to - you'll remember the Greeks and Turks just don't get on and there is usually a Greek gunboat posted midway between the (Turkish) mainland and Simi to warn off anyone displaying a Turkish flag from entering their waters! And they're not playing either!We then sail east towards Dirsek and then westwards again to Datca past Ova Buku and then due north past the Greek Island of Kos before finishing at the Sunsail base of Turgutreis.
We're actually doing what Sunsail call a 'delivery flotilla' which basically means that we're taking the yachts from their winter berth at Marmaris, out to the 'local' base of Turgutreis for the upcoming summer season - the advantage for us being that it's a one-way flotilla where we get to see different places all the time and don't double back on ourselves as we would do with a conventional flotilla. The slight logistical complication is that we arrive at Dalaman airport near Marmaris and depart 2 weeks later from Bodrum airport assuming that we don't sink somewhere in between!
Our boat is a Sun Odyssey 37, which means it's over 11 metres long with a 4 metre beam; it draws just less than 2 metres so depthwise we should be ok in most places we visit. It's a 3-cabin, 6-berth vessel so we should have enough room for the four of us with some to spare but having sailed together many times before we're familiar with the set-up and co-existing in 'close-quarters' in most ways you can imagine! Most times we'll moor up 'stern-to' which is the usual system in Turkey so we'll have to master the often tricky manouvre of reversing an 11 metre yacht fairly quickly!
Also, as we've been around this area before a couple of times I expect that we'll be in fairly remote areas mostly without any contact by phone or internet although in an emergency, Sunsail will be able to reach us through their local bases. I'm hoping to take my pda with me however so that I can at least type out a short draft daily Blog which I'll summarise and bore everyone with when I get back.
