Kimisolazi

Never left the ship today. It was a day for total relaxation, sunning, swimming, eating super delicious meals, and soaking up this sunny sea. We've been gently rocking as if we were in a giant cradle, lovely! We sailed from the little cove where we spent last night, and came about 30 miles further west to Ekincik, another small cove. This one has a hotel or yacht club where many other sail boats pulled in all afternoon to moor for the night.There was great entertainment, almost Laurel and Hardy style, when a German yacht with 5 male passengers attempted to anchor itself to some rocks adjacent to our gulet. This is an operation that we have now watched our nimble crew perform many times with great efficiency in about five minutes. They race to the shore with a small dinghy, attach a rope to a rock or a piton, while simultaneously lowering the anchor from the bow. Then both lines are tightened holding the ship in place through the night. These Turkish crew members are totally shipshape. We have watched them and learned the meaning of "running a tight ship".

The German guys backed in next to us and spent an hour and a half trying to tie up. They first tried to attach to the same rock as we were using, and kept drifting perilously close to us. The engine on their dinghy gave up, and one ended up swimming back to the ship dragging the dinghy by a rope around his chest. None of them was able to tie a nautical knot. Their rope kept slipping, snapping, snarling, and coming undone. We watched in amazement as they struggled to attach the ship using a square knot, a completely futile proposition. Many times the rope snapped away from the ship and sank into the water. This meant that they had to paddle back to the rock, retrieve the rope, and start over ...and over... and over!

At one point they actually backed their ship right over the dinghy. Several times they backed up over their rope, lying slack in the water. They came perilously close to hitting our ship so many times that our crew finally hung bumpers around that side. And they never said a word to us, even though we were 10 feet from this riveting drama. Finally they gave up, yanked in all their rope and anchor, and pulled into the yacht club marina, which probably cost them a pretty penny, but maybe not as much as it would have cost them had they crashed into our ship. We were delighted to see them leave.

So that's all the drama from the high seas today, folks. Stay tuned for more tales of adventure in the few remaining days we have on this little journey! Life is really, really good here.

-- Posted from my iPad

Location:Gazi Beğendi Sk,Kuşadası,Turkey