Broken Winch
This morning at 6am, while the rest of us were asleep, the crew discovered that the winch that raises the anchor was broken. Somehow the captain and Utgur and Mustafa hauled up the chain by hand and wrestled the big anchor into its keeping place; but it was clear that our itinerary would have to change. Instead of sailing on to Simi, we turned back to Turkey. The idea was that Hussein, who owns the boat, would send someone down by road to meet us and fix the winch. Instead of visiting Simi in the morning and spending the afternoon swimming, we would spend the morning swimming and the afternoon visiting Simi.
Except that when the mechanic arrived after the three hour drive south from Bodrum, accompanied by Hussein himself, and spent an hour mucking with the engine, it turned out that the part needed machining, so they hopped back in the car to drive South another three hours to Marmaris to do that.
So we were condemned to spend a day swimming from the boat, 
paddling about in the two kayaks, reading our books and nursing our sunburns. The bay we are anchored in is turquoise; rocks run right down into the sea, and small multicoloured fish flick around them. Looking away from the shore is a distant island, purple in the haze, lending its colour to the water which really is, as Homer would have it, wine-dark. As our friend Kim put it, it’s a hard life when the biggest decision you have to make is whether you want to sit in the sun, the shade, or half and half.