We departed from Yalıkavak Marina on 30.08.2009 Sunday morning and decided to buy fuel from the Greek island of Kos as it is cheaper there. But it was not our lucky day. Just after leaving the marina my wife broke a huge piece of mirror. Within minutes afterwards we lost our GPS signal ! We always use pilot books and charts to study our route before leaving port, we also keep a paper chart next to the helm and keep a mental picture of where we are. Yet an integrated gps and chartplotter (which places our position on an electronic chart) unit is important because when we go medium or long distance cruising we often cruise at fast speeds within the 25-30 knot range.
When sailing one has to know where he is. So we have further devices to help us navigate. These are a seperate hand held gps where we can plot our position on the chart, our radar which can be used to some degree to help us navigate and our depth sounder which is often quite helpful. Then there is the manual navigation methods of course. Noone on our boat knows celestial navigation and even if we did, I would not use it during daytime coastal cruises.
Personally I dislike overrelience on electronics as this breeds a kind of skippers who watch the chartplotter screen all the time. Without gps many people can not navigate but there is also the fact that charts are not to be relied upon blindly as they are subject to errors. Local knowledge based on daily experiences is sometimes more important than printed charts, especially around the shores and in small bays. Here is one photograph I took on our previous sailboat. It appears we should be aground whereas we are not and this is just a chartplotter (digital map's) mistake.
We are not happy without gps but keep going towards Kos. Just as we are to enter the harbour our skipper tells me something is strange with our throttle controls. A rope might be stuck to our propeller. The boat was ready entering the harbour and we were at idle speed so I could not notice this. Immediately we reversed engines and kept a safe distance from the shore, turned the engines off and then our skipper and the deckhand jumped into the water. They did not have good news, the rope is made from a quite strong synthetic material, is thick and can not be easily cut or removed from the propellers. It took some effort to dive down underneath the hull and reach the propelers. We are within one minute distance to Kos harbor but other than the difficulty of finding an emergency diver at short notice abroad on a Sunday morning, we are most likely to be charged much more than in Turkey. So we decided to get back to Bodrum Marina which is located at the Bodrum center and is very close to Kos. We can not use one propeller so we turn the starboard engine off and with the remaining one it took around one hour to go to Bodrum.
We then called Bodrum marina by VHF to explain our situation and ask for a berth for one night but got no help. The marina officer said the marina was fully booked and we could not stay. She was probably checking her reservations sheet which said there were no free spots. This time I made a telephone call to the marina front office. The manager was not there but upon me asking for their help, the front office manager told me that we could berth alongside the fuel pontoon for several hours.
Just after we approched the fuel dock our diver also arrived. He was a cool and friendly fellow working with the archeological dive team run by a friends's brother. This is what I love about Turkey. Things are fast and practical. People are helpful and focus on getting the job done. Life goes on 24x7 and the system is designed to work so almost anything can be done anytime, anywhere.
We sent the diver underneath our hull and I headed to the marina office. Bodrum marina is “the marina” in Turkey. It is so popular that finding a place is impossible. Personally I like it less because cental Bodrum is quite noisy and the Bodrum harbor which also houses the marina as well as many other commercial yachts and gulets is quite polluted. My visit to the marina office resulted us getting a berth for one night because I had been their client for many years and still know the managers. I got back to the boat and the diver was still busy removing the rope. It took him 45 minutes to complete his job. What a rope this was ! My friend was also with us so we all enjoyed a beer afterwards.
No comments:
Post a Comment