Hope's and Howard's Sailing Adventures

We arrived back in our ‘home from home’, Finike Marina, on September 12 and departed on October 7. In the interim we had some more boat work done by the yard there. Their stainless steel workmanship is excellent (arch for the solar panels fabricated earlier this year), and they had no difficulty making an anchor strike plate to curve around the bow (our new anchor had done a little damage.. Read More

We hired a car in Kefalos in order to do some provisioning, visit several sites of historic interest, and view the marina in Kos town, at the other end (NE) of the island prior to the arrival of two UK friends. Stocking up was easy at the sole Lidl store on the island, but we were amazed to subsequently find a newly opened Tesco. The town of Kos was enjoyable.. Read More

Sounio Bay, with its temple to Poseidon, was our last anchorage before we departed for Kea, an island in the Cyclades closest to Athens. We had planned to cruise the Cyclades throughout the month of August. However, as mentioned previously, July and August usually have the strongest Meltemi winds so our route through the islands was predicated by the vagaries of the weather. We experienced a gentle downwind sail most.. Read More

Our stay in the large (1,000 berth) Alimos Marina, near Athens was useful. We finally managed to swop our empty camping gas bottles for full ones as well as purchase a few other boat bits from an excellent yacht chandler nearby. However, Athens was suffering from extreme heat, (the Acropolis was closed to visitors from noon until 5:00 pm each day) so our energy levels were rather low. Indeed, we.. Read More

Finally, we arrived in Greece at the island of Chios in the eastern Sporades. We had intended entering Greece further north at Lesvos, to explore the eastern Sporades islands further north and the northern Sporades islands close to mainland Greece, but the approximate five weeks delay due to boat issues severely impacted our timeline. As previously mentioned we needed to be near Athens by July 20 in order to meet.. Read More

Although frustrated by the week-long Bayram holiday when we had to wait for Osman the mechanic to return to work, we were quite content at anchor in Haceteppe Bay. It was a popular spot, especially during the day as the swimming was excellent and it was close to several marinas in the Çesme region. The village of Dalyan at the head of a lovely long, boat-lined inlet and with a.. Read More

As we said in our last post, we hung around Bodrum a while awaiting word from a couple of enquiries about installing the new Vesper AIS that Ian had kindly brought with him from the UK. We ended up using a technician in Bodrum but in the meantime enjoyed exploring another anchorage or two in the vicinity. We first explored Aquarium Bay, but were not happy that the holding was.. Read More

Tarkan, our rigger, returned to Lady Mayfair the day before our new mainsail was due to arrive. He swapped out our mainsail furling line (which involved re-splicing the continuous line) as the thicker line was jamming in the furling drum and he re-tuned the rigging after the mast had settled back into position. So, just 5 days after ordering our sail and 4 days after measuring, our new sail was.. Read More

Our Easter Sunday was spent on passage, a pretty good way of enjoying it in our opinion. The passage from Karacoren to Marmaris we estimated would take us about 7 hours, assuming we maintained an average speed of about 6 knots so we didn’t have the luxury of hanging around. While we had the engine on all the way, we did unfurl the genoa a couple of times, which helped.. Read More

It’s hard to believe we have been in Finike since October; the time has passed quickly. We did, however, have a couple of trips to catch up with family. The first one was to Glasgow for about a week for a gathering of Hope’s McAusland cousins, which hasn’t happened for too many years. The second was to Wales for Christmas with the Newth family, where Sonia joined us, then to.. Read More