Well it's a long story...but it will be cut short to a few words and some pictures..........
2012- We moved Sunflower from Finike to Fethiye, having done a major re-paint job on her. New bottom paint as well as repainting the topsides and deck stripes.
2013- We then settled into Fethiye, Turkey. We love Turkey, nice, friendly people,beautiful scenery and cheap prices. We also accidentally bought a Villa in the hills at Ovacik!! (we were walking past a real estate office when Wendy raced out the door, hauled us in and forced us to buy a villa!) We also returned to Sydney in June for a quick knee repair.
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Yelkenli Villa in Ovacik
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| Dee spent a lot of time furnishing it. |
The plan was to spend summer sailing Sunflower around the Med, then spend winter at the villa and travelling around Turkey. We did not realise how cold it gets in winter! Good fun for the first year, however we didn't travel as much as we had hoped in the winter, although on a sunny winters day with blue sky the countryside was glorious.
We loved the villa and had fun fixing it up and furnishing it, we also had many friends from all over the world come and visit us.
Fethiye is a lovely town and we had Sunflower in the ECE Saray marina, about 15 mins drive from the villa.
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| Ece Saray Marina with snow capped mountains behind. |
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| The marina, main dock (with high speed ferry to Rhodes, Greece) |
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| Panomitus on the Greek island of Symi |
2014 - We took Sunflower to Greece! We had to leave Turkey for 3 months to reset our visa so we did a short trip to the Greek island of Symi and onto another Greek island, Kos. Most of this time was spent waiting for spare water maker parts to be delivered, or else waiting for weather to go where we wanted to! Then it was back to the villa for winter.
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| Our 4 bedroom house in Sydney. |
2015 - This was a big year! It was sell, sell sell! We decided life had become a little dull, so we decided to sell the house in Sydney, the villa in Turkey and Sunflower and then see what happened! We also visited Florida in February to check out property there as well as power boats whilst visiting friends.We told Wendy to sell the villa (which she did and got a good price for it) while we went to Australia, upgraded and sold our big old house, near the centre of Sydney and bought a smaller apartment near Newcastle (2 hrs drive north of Sydney).
Selling the Sydney house had always been our long term plan and as the Sydney market was very hot it seemed like a good time to do it. We were also increasingly worried about the political situation in Turkey and foresaw bad things happening, so wanted to sell the villa while the going was good. Big sigh of relief that went according to plan!
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| Sunflower having a "bottom job", before leaving Turkey |
2016- Although we had placed Sunflower with a broker in Auckland, we didn't make much effort to sell her, so we returned to her in March 2016 with a view to sailing her to Spain or Gibraltar and see how we felt about being full time live aboard sailors again. We were a bit out of practice as apart from a brief trip to Greece she had been languishing in marinas for nearly 4 years. So we bought a new radar, 2 new sails, had a new bimini, and cockpit enclosures made as well as a hundred and one other little upgrades. She was looking good inside and out as we had had new paintwork done in Finike and we had re-varnished the insides while living in the villa. (nice to be able to leave your mess behind and go home to a clean house rather than live amongst the varnish pots!)
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| The view from our new apartment in Australia. |
We left Turkey for the last time on June 7th, said goodbye to all our friends and favourite places. We hadn't realised just how much Fethiye had felt like home.
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| Motoring through the Corinth Canal, from the Aegean to the Ionian seas |
It is now the end of July and we have battled our way across the Aegean Sea and most of the Greek islands against the prevailing winds. We are now on the island of Ithaca off the west coat of mainland Greece before we cross to Italy. We have reservations in marinas in Cartagena, Spain as well as Gibraltar, so we'll see how far we get....
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| Another sunrise while underway |
