10th May 2006 - Kekova to Finnike

Posted at 3:04 PM, Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Not much to report on this short 18 mile leg.  We spent the morning defore departure on a short gullet trip to the ruins of Kale Koy - only 10 minutes from Kekova.

The ruined castle there is quite magnificent, partly because of the location on a hill top giving 360 degree views back over our anchorage and the surrounding landscape and partly because the battlements stand out so well in the otherwise barren land.  On the slopes outside the castle there are numerous carved sarcorphogi some of which are almost as pristine as when they first buried people there some 2 or 3 thousand years ago.  The small jetties on which we landed can be seen to be built upon the sunken quay that once allowed the ancient seafaring people of the region to do thier trade.

This part of the Lycian coast was once part of Phonecia (Finnike is the ancient city of Phonesius) - and in their day these guys had the largest trading fleet in the world - travelling as far as afield as Cornwall in the Uk to purchase tin.

Anyway - yesterday on our run to Kerkova we snapped a weld on the boom fitting of our boom vang - so as we had to get to Finnike by 1430 to fit in with bertning plans, and only finished our morning tour at 1130 - we simply motored the leg down the coast to get parked up and able to organise a welder to come and sort the problem.

Got a suprise with our welcome on arrival in Setur Marina at Finnike - with a rose handed to Sue - and a gift bag of fresh locally grown oranges.  Nice touch.

This marina run by the Setur group has freebie wi-fi access which I'm using to help reduce GPRS connection costs.

The girls are all off for a ladies Hamman (Turkish Bath) right now.  Then we've been invited for dinner on board Strella Encore - a US registered but Franch owned Hylas 53.

Cheers

JOHN