Orhaniye, Turkey

Our new home base in Turkey was a marina that had been recommended to us by another boat we had met in Sudan. We needed to haul Northern Magic out of the water, and this marina had a half-price special on haul-outs this winter. But we were surprised and a little taken aback to find it in the middle of wilderness, with only one small village, Orhaniye, located a twenty-minute walk away. Once upon a time it was planned that this be part of a posh hotel resort, but the hotel part of it never got off the ground. So now it was just a nice, well-equipped marina in the middle of nowhere. But it was a lovely nowhere.

It felt as if we were back on a camping holiday in northern Ontario. If the hills had been a little shorter and rounder, the pine trees a little more dense, and if we had traded Northern Magic for our old canoe and tent, we might have been right back in Algonquin Park on a weekend in early June. But in this Turkish version of Algonquin Park were the ruins of some kind of small, fortified structure, perhaps a church. The ruins were right inside the marina grounds. A modern wooden cross was now leaning at the end of the largest chamber, whose floors were carpeted with wild daisies. Some of the stones in the church's crumbling walls even had Greek letters inscribed on them. Sometime in antiquity, someone had stolen these from ruins of an even more ancient vintage.

Although we used to go to wilderness camping in Algonquin Park every year, in all those glorious summers of exploration we'd never found the remains of an ancient Greek temple complex, not even once.

But our primary objective here was not exploration; it was to get the boat back in shape. It had only been six months since we had careened the boat on a beach in Kenya and given her a new coat of anti-fouling paint, but that scandalous paint turned out to be more of a magnet for algae than a repellent. Within a week of applying it, our hull had developed more underwater growth than it had accumulated during the previous six months. Throughout our trip up the Red Sea, Herbert had been gnashing his teeth about the massive waste of work and money involved in applying that paint, while being forced to spend one day per week diving under the boat to scrub off the hull.

Now we were going to sand the old paint completely off and apply a brand new coat of high quality anti-fouling we had bought in Israel. If that paint wasn't good enough to take us home, Herbert was going to have to commit hara kiri with an anchor fluke.

Within two days of arriving, Northern Magic was lifted out of the water in the slings of a travel-lift, a special boat-lifting machine, and set ashore near the walls of that intriguing ruin. Day after day our captain sanded off layers of old paint and applied layers of new. To get onto the boat we all had to clamber up a tall metal scaffold.

The hilly countryside around us was so beautiful that the boys and I decided to take up jogging. Michael, Jonathan and I set in the direction of the village, loping along winding country roads rimmed by wildflowers and hundreds of blue wooden boxes that turned out to be beehives. Once, the owner of one of these hives opened it up for us, showing us the honeycomb and the honey his bees were busily making inside. He picked up a bee, pinched off its stinger, and squeezed its poor abdomen until liquid came out of its proboscis and pooled in a large drop on his hand. We tasted it - it was honey, straight from the bee. We were surrounded by swarms of buzzing bees, and one of them got tangled up in Jonathan's mop of thick brown hair. He didn't panic, and the Turkish beekeeper just plucked the ensnared bee out with his fingers, held it for a moment, and flicked it away.

The village itself was picturesque, with cows mooing, chickens clucking and the Three Billy Goats Gruff guarding various little bridges and hillsides against evil trolls. Fluffy white lambs frolicked in fields of cauliflower and cabbage and once, one little fellow bolted out right in front of us, stopping and staring at us with wide eyes and great bleats of alarm as if to say, "Oh no! Strangers! What do I do? What do I do?" Then he scampered back to the security of his mother's woolly flanks. Well-fed Turkish women stooped in their gardens wearing colourful long skirts and woven vests, thick-soled black shoes and heavy white woollen leggings. They all wore long, brightly patterned headscarves, often with little sequins dangling down, making me think of gypsies.

While their wives worked, rows of handsome Turkish men with their hair nicely styled, their moustaches perfectly trimmed, sat in a line by the roadside drinking pungent Turkish coffee out of tiny glass cups. I felt like a creature from another planet jogging by in my sweatsuit and baseball cap, for I looked nothing like the solid, conservative farm wives that were keeping these men's houses and raising their broods of children. But everyone was friendly enough, and waved as we passed. We stopped to catch our breaths at Girl Sand Beach, which had neither the girls nor the sand its hand-painted sign promised, only a restaurant that was boarded up for the winter. Then we headed back to the marina, arriving back at the boat virtuously huffing and puffing.

Depressingly, I was the only one, the next day, to have sore muscles. Even more disturbingly, for I have always cherished my position as the fastest runner in the family, my 14-year old son was able to literally run circles around me, which was definitely not the case the last time we jogged together. Sigh.

With such ready access to land, the kids began taking their recess breaks from schoolwork to play soccer inside the walls of the old ruin, often with a young Turkish girl who lives at the marina. The boys were outside on one of these breaks, while I was helping Herbert do something-or-other in the engine room, when there was a clatter just outside the boat, followed by a huge scream. It was such an intense, unbroken shriek that I couldn't immediately recognize which of the boys was making it. Whatever had caused that wail must have been something bad.

Swinging over the abyss of the engine room using overhead handholds - Herbert was deep inside, bent over, and so was slower to extricate himself - I burst outside through Michael's hatch to discover that the boy in distress was in fact Jonathan. He was lying unmoving on the ground beside Northern Magic on his back, his terrible scream still piercing the air. Obviously he had fallen off the ladder.

With one hand on the boat, I leaned over and grabbed the metal scaffolding to climb down. The instant I did, my body sizzled and jumped with a powerful electric shock. Reflexively, I released the scaffold and cradled the hand that had grabbed it, zinging with pain up to the wrist. Now I truly realized what had happened to poor Jon, and it was more serious than just a fall. An electric shock had thrown him from the top of the ladder.

"Honey! Get here right away! The boat's electrified! Get here right NOW!" I yelled. Obviously there was a short circuit in the boat's power, and the instant anyone connected the boat with the ground, through the metal ladder, they completed the circuit, using their own body to conduct 240 volts of electricity. As long as the power was still surging through the boat's metal decks, stanchions and lifelines, I had no way of getting down to help Jon.

By now Michael, who had still been playing inside the ruin, had sprinted up. Seeing me jump back from the shock, he had the presence of mind to run over to the outlet that connected us to external power. As soon as he pulled the plug, I gingerly touched the ladder. This time receiving no shock, I climbed down as quickly as I could and finally knelt beside poor Jonathan.

"Mom, I got shocked," is all he could say.

The whole marina had heard the commotion and we were now surrounded by a ring of 10 or 15 concerned people. Before doing anything, I made myself pause to remember what I'd been taught at first aid training. Don't move him. Check for spinal injuries first. So without moving Jon from the wet ground, Herbert and I carefully touched and prodded, saw that toes were wiggling and all body parts working, before helping him up. After grabbing the metal stanchions of the boat and getting the shock, he had fallen almost three metres down, landing flat on his back. But nothing was broken, and the shock itself seemed not to have hurt him.

"When I grabbed the boat and got shocked, it seemed to hold me there for five seconds," he told me a few hours later, his eyes glistening and his lips trembling just a bit in response to the painful memory. "I couldn't move. My whole body was on fire. Then when I was falling, it seemed like slow motion, like I was twirling through the air."

But Jon bravely got up, climbed that ladder again and got to eat jellybeans in bed for the next hour. In short order he was back on his feet, sore, but none the worse for wear. His guardian angel must have been standing over him that day, ("You mean under him," corrects Michael as I read this story aloud,) because it could have been so much worse. ("He'd better not fall again," says Michael, "because his angel probably got squashed.")

While Jon was recuperating with his book and jelly beans, Herbert got to work finding out what had caused the short circuit. Even with a metal rod connecting the boat to the ground, the instant external power was reconnected, the hull of the boat was electrified again. After ten minutes of experimentation, the culprit turned out to be our battery charger, which we had bought brand new in Cyprus just two weeks before. Herbert threw it away without even attempting to repair it.

"There's no way I'm ever going to trust that thing again," he said emphatically, "even if I get it fixed. We're buying a new one."

Jon recovered with no ill effects, and next day was back playing soccer, climbing up and down that ladder like a monkey as if nothing had ever happened. Except now, before he grabs the stanchion on the boat, he gives it a little tap first.

Note from your web hosts
We have added some new pictures of the Northern Magic Turkey today. See our Slide Show