If I've learned anything from being a full time liveaboard, it is that things change.
We heard about an idyllic anchorage from Kev and Dee on Sailing Kejstral. They'd visited it early in the season, possibly before the Turkish sailing season really began. They way they described it made us very eager to visit it for ourselves. We finally got there in the middle of July.
The anchorage was exactly how they'd described it and as we'd arrived early morning we got to enjoy this slice of paradise for many hours.
Paradise lost
We were feeling very contented as we sat in the cockpit of A B Sea, sipping our drinks and settling in to enjoy the sunset. Then 'they' arrived.
One or two at first, but steadily more and more, until there were literally hundreds of wasps all over the boat. They weren't aggressive, they were just doing what wasps do as inquisitive creatures, checking things out and looking for water and food.
We had our swimming stuff drying at the swim platform and the wasps found that to be a great source of water.
One of the things about wasps is that they like to be home before dark, so we knew that at some point in time they'd leave. However it doesn't get dark until about 21:00 hours during summer in this part of the world. Eventually it got ridiculous with wasps buzzing around us so we decided to close all of the hatches, go below and wait until they left.
The following morning I was woken by the sound of buzzing at 05:30 hours. The wasps like to get an early start and they now found A B Sea to be a veritable reservoir of water after the heavy overnight dew fall.
Fortunately by 07:45 hours they'd had their fill of water and nearly all of them had buggered off to pastures anew. That gave us the opportunity to go ashore and fly the drone. As you'll see in this week's video.
Moving on
We had planned to stay at the anchorage for 2 or 3 nights, but the thought of having to endure the wasp visitation each evening and morning made us decide to move on.
Our next planned anchorage was Didim, only 2 hours to the north. Didim has 3 bays where you can anchor and our plan A was to drop the hook in the biggest of the three bays.
The short hop was mostly uneventful except for the sighting of a couple of dolphin fins breaking the surface of the water. They were obviously engaged in some sort of activity because they didn't come to play at the bow of the boat.
We arrived at Didim at 09:20 hours and anchored in sand in 6 metres (19.6 feet) of water. The big bay shallows gently and we thought we'd found a good spot far enough away from the already crowded beaches and the two big yellow buoys that denote the area for hired jet skis to zoom around.
Our main reason for visiting Didim was to stock up on provisions. All we had left in the fridge was four sausages, we needed more bottled water and we'd run out of beer. An early morning dinghy ride to shore gave us what we needed and then it was back onboard to do some work in the shaded outside office of the cockpit.
At 10:00 hours a dozen or so day tripper boats all departed the harbour wall and paraded in a line around the bay playing Turkish music at volume level 11. That wasn't so bad as they eventually disappeared off to their chosen anchorage spots further along the coast.
Next came the motor boats towing children-laden inflatables behind them. The children of course screaming for their lives every time the inflatable became airborne. Didim bay is huge, it is 1.38 kilometres (0.86 miles) across and we were the only boat at anchor. This therefore made us a prime target for the drivers of the motor boats to zip around.
Then the jet skis arrived. As I said we had deliberately anchored far away from the two big yellow buoys that denote the jet ski area. But it seemed that area wasn't big enough for them and they decided to include A B Sea as a third yellow buoy.
Around about 11:00 hours the music started from a very big beach bar. Minutes later its music was almost drowned out by the music from a neighbouring beach bar. This process continued until there were four or five beach bars competing to see who had the biggest amplifier.
For transparency I will say that I was a club DJ for 22 years so I'm not adverse to loud music. The annoyance was simply that each bar was playing different types of music, all of different tempos and the resultant cacophony of sound was an indistinguishable mess of noise.
This went on all day until the sun set and everyone went home. We decided that we'd be moving anchorage the following morning and I'll tell you all about that in next week's blog.
Follow the link to watch the video that accompanies this blog click here.
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