Bozuk Buku

Bozuk Buku April 16, 2011
We left the bustling Marmaris Bay in the morning and headed into the open sea, motoring west along the Turkish coast and waiting for the sea breeze to pick up. Taking the lesson we learned from our run to Marmaris which was mostly motoring and pounding into headwinds, we decided to change our strategy from now on: forget the schedule, wait for a favorable weather window, and sail rather than motor! That’s what sensible sailors do. At least that’s the theory. The forecast for the next several days is that the weather will be fine, with light winds, and flat sea. So we picked our next anchorage to be a short distance of 25 nautical miles away, allowing time for slow sailing and tacking as long as there’s at least a trace of wind. And sail we did – Three Rivers sailing with all four sails up, doing about 5 knots in 10 knots of wind, close-hauled.

This stretch of coast is markedly different from the coast line east of Marmaris. Gone are the wooded mountains and green hills of pine forests, instead, the coastlines are replaced by barren, rocky hills that are mostly uninhabited. The sea is mostly empty except for the odd sailboats. The sky is overcast with high level clouds, and the sea’s steely blue reflects it. Our enjoyable sail lasted for about three hours, when the wind turned dead on the nose, and then died completely. On with the iron horse again.

By late afternoon we arrived Bozuk Buku, a well-sheltered anchorage at the tip of a long peninsula that jugs out into the Mediterranean Sea. On one corner of the bay, an ancient Hellenistic citadel overlooks the sea, most of its walls still preserved virtually intact. But there was no sign of human activities now, except for several other boats that were anchored here, and under the orange glow of the setting sun, the bay is pretty in its bleak isolation.