Blue Cruise

We spent the last 4 days at Sea on a Turkish Gulet sailing from Olympos to Fethiye. A gulet is an all wooden handcrafted motor sailing yacht equipped with 1 or 2 masts, built for cruising the Mediterranean Coast. Gulets were originally built and used by fishermen and sponge divers to transport their catch. Today they have been re-designed especially for yachting holidays.
We went with a company called V-Go and it only cost about $250 each for 4 days/3 nights including all our food.  Great deal!
We were picked up in Cirali and taken to the port about an hour away in Demer. We saw the Sunken City of Kekova (this is a Lycian-Roman archaeological site), Simena (a traditional Turkish fishing village with no car access and a huge  Byzantine/Ottoman castle on the top of the hill) and Gokkaya Bay.  Day two we went to Kas where we first had breakfast and a swim in a nice and quiet bay in front of the little town and then stopped in the harbour for lunch and super shopping…seriously, it’s a good thing we only had 2 hours or we’d be broke. It was full of silver shops and made a mean iced coffee! We then sailed near Kalkan were we stopped in Firnaz Bay for the night. Day three, after swimming in a bay for the morning, we ventured to Oludeniz (The Blue Lagoon) and the last stop of the day is St-Nicholas Island or Gemiler Island( on the small island are the remains of several churches built between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, along with a variety of associated buildings. Archaeologists believe it was the location of the original tomb of Saint Nicholas), and finally Samanlik bay before heading into Fethiye harbour.


We had such an amazing time. There were 8 other people on our boat and we really lucked out and got a fantastic crowd, we got along great and had tons of fun. We spent our days  swimming, sun tanning, exploring and eating.


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We all had a small double cabin, but with no air conditioning it was sweltering, so everyone just slept on the sunbeds on the deck like a giant sleepover and watched the stars before falling asleep. We had a large assortment of flotation devices that sell for cheap in all the towns to entertain ourselves… watching Nick, Das and Andrea try to all mount the floating caterpillar was a highlight.

Sarah's perfect swan dive.

 

The captain always pulled anchor early and start sailing to our next destination before breakfast. On our second day the Sea was really rough and after about 6 hours of sailing we were all green and couldn’t get off the boat fast enough. Thankfully, the sea was fairly calm the rest of the time. The weather was perfect with blue skies, mid 30’s during the day but it cooled off nicely at night.

Joseph, the Captain, gutting our fish.

Iced Coffee in Kas

Breakfast Feast.

The food was really delicious and how the captain managed to put together such feasts from the smallest kitchen on the planet was baffling. They would even catch fresh fish every day.