“Alarming” breakdown

In my last blog I described the atmospheric beauty of ancient Knidos which lies at the very tip of the Datça peninsula in the south-west of Turkey.

It was such a buzz being anchored in this harbour where many thousands of merchant vessels and warships had been anchored before us, over the course of more than 2,500 years.

Our friends Sue and John on S/V Catabella who had arrived in Knidos before us, decided to travel up the other side of the peninsula to Kairos Marina for a much needed hose-down of their boat which had been covered in soot and ash from the recent terrible forest fires.

We hadn’t had enough of Knidos yet and decided to stay an extra day to have a little more of a look round.

Shortly after we had waved them off we saw another familiar boat come into view – a pretty little traditional yacht called Wild Rover of Dart that we had last seen in Finike Marina when she was having new timber decks installed.

Her skipper Karl, anchored nearby and once settled, swam over to say “hello”. We arranged to have a drink together later but before long Karl came on over the radio and invited us over for a meal.

It was great to meet his crew Kendall, who was currently based in Chicago but was originally from Connecticut. We had a great time swapping travelling tales and stories from our youth, and setting the world to rights.

Later we decided to dinghy over and have a further look at Knidos.

Wandering around this site just before sunset was fantastic as the warm rosy orange glow of the setting sun brought the ancient stones to life and created a magical atmosphere.

We joined a small throng of visitors to view the glorious sunset from the water’s edge. It was absolutely spectacular – the photos I took just don’t do it justice.

As if the beauty of the sunset wasn’t enough, an obliging yacht sailed past the glowing golden orb just as it dipped into the sea. It was such a fabulous sight that when the sun had finally disappeared the crowd burst into spontaneous applause!

As if in competition to this wonderful sunset a full moon rose, shimmering in all her finery.

All that beauty called for a celebration so we retired to the beer garden below the lovely little restaurant for a nightcap.

The following day we were up early as we had arranged to meet the crew of Catabella en route to our destination Yedi Adalari (Seven Islands).

There was a wonderful breeze and for once we were going with it and had a great few hours of lovely sailing. We had a slight problem while we were pulling the main sail up as the piece of rope that attached the clew of the sail to the boom snapped!

Fortunately, the “lazy jacks” held the sail in place while Jonathan replaced the rope.

But that wasn’t the end to our woes! On our approach to our anchorage in Gökağaç at Yedi Adlari, we switched on our engines and brought down the sails. All was fine – until the water ingress alarm in the starboard engine started to buzz incessantly, persistently and very annoyingly!

We have become used to the alarm going off as it has been happening intermittently ever since we took possession of Sunday. In fact when we bought her, we had to reconnect the alarm – we figured the previous owners had got so fed up with the alarm going off for no reason that they had disconnected it!

So we simply ignored the alarm and carried on. Just before we were about to anchor we noticed that the rev counter had suddenly stopped working and then when I went to send the anchor down the hand controller wouldn’t respond!

Meanwhile that damned alarm kept on going and going with its interminable high pitched wailing!

Fortunately the anchorage wasn’t crowded and we weren’t in any danger of crashing into anything but we had to get that anchor down so Jonathan released the clutch on the windlass and just allowed shed-loads of chain to free fall!

Then came the problem of the engine – because the ignition wasn’t working the engine couldn’t be switched off.

Working on the principle that two heads are better than one, John from Catabella came over and eventually the emergency cut off switch was located!

Now we were stuck with no way of starting the starboard engine which is the one that controls the anchor winch.

Would we have to stay in (the rather bleak) Gökağaç for ever? Or pull the anchor (and it’s extremely heavy 10mm short link chain) up by hand? Or was there another solution?!

The find out the answer to that conundrum look out for the next instalment of “Salty Tales”.