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Aboard a Turkish Ketch
| Article
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20701 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
2,463 Words |
| Author
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Russell Warren Howe
Russell Warren Howe, a former foreign, diplomatic, and defense
correspondent, is the author of sixteen books. They include
Matahari-The True Story and a recent novel, Flight of the
Cormorants. |
Bird song and wind song are the sounds heard at dawn where the Turkish Aegean and the Mediterranean meet. Waking early, one hears no water splashing against moored boots, no breakers, no hollow noise of the undercurrent. There is no phone ringing, no television cackling, no boom box on a nearby boat. No one has a newspaper; there is no mail to collect.
I slip off the bunk and head up to the deck. A crewmember is stirring and I ask him to make mint tea. Everyone else still sleeps, and breakfast is sometime off. This is Mediterranean life; there are no fixed times for meals.
I resume a prone attitude on the padded seat on the poop deck under an awning, sipping tea and plotting photo shots as the early sun peeps over the sand--and pine--colored hills that shelter our mooring. We are anchored in a cove, our stern lines twisted around two flimsy trees. They seem unchallenged by the motionless seventy tons of our traditional Turkish ketch--which the Turks call a golet, from the French goelette, schooner.
This is vague-a-l'ame country; in the warm dawn, listlessness prevails, especially as Mustafa and I are the only human creatures awake. Other golets are moored far enough away so that any of us could swing on the anchor should our shorelines snap, which is unlikely. On many of them, summer sailors are sleeping on the sundecks and enjoying the occasional light breeze.
Most of the year, the Aegean is a peaceful, even tame sea, but it has its bellicose moments. The whole Mediterranean is a sort of oxbow lake of the Atlantic. The main tide rushes in through the narrow Gibraltar Strait in what mariners call a "race." (No one has ever swum the strait, although it is only eight miles across at its narrowest point--if you can't see the Atlas Mountains of Morocco from Gibraltar, you know it's going to rain.) Then, slowing down, it crawls toward Suez and takes eighty years to return. There are four high and low tides a day instead of two, and the difference between them is small.
The Aegean is an oxbow lake of an oxbow lake. When wind and other factors stir it, it proves that it is easier to create tidal waves by dividing into a bathtub than a swimming pool. Boats built for Aegean/Mediterranean fishing are constructed to face these occasional storms. Like all trawlers, they are a plump, floating hold, not built for speed--although their four sails can make ten knots or more when they have
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