Christmas Day was a good one for us and I hope for you all too. The Didim Yacht Club put on a traditional English style buffet (Covid, what Covid?) and we had a table of 16, mostly yachties but some locals too. Emma and Don gave us a beautiful painting of Entre Nous that they had done from a photo they took when we were all in Iassos. Were going to put it up with the one Hew gave us of Chat Eau Bleu from a magazine article that he wrote after our Madagascar "event". Christmas Day was from midday to 1 am! Some of us nearly made it the whole way through!! Not me, I went home to bed at about 8pm - wine and champagne. Kiki and Cora closed the band down - youth!

New Year was deliberately quiet as we planned to sail to Bodrum early on Saturday morning. We had dinner on board (Cora made beautiful chicken tagine and apple pie dessert) and we had a couple of other boats over. John and Sue from Catabella and Jack and Jan from Anthem. Everyone having said we were all having just a couple of drinks and not seeing NY in we ended up seeing it in. However we were up and gone by 8.30 and so saw the first susrise of 2022. May it be a better year worldwide……

The trip to Bodrum was lovely and the view coming it to the bay with the famous castle at the approach very memorable. The weather was fantastic for the 4 days with day temperatures of 18 and lows of 12. We were mostly in shirt sleeves and at lunchtime people were everywhere on the beaches sitting at lunch in almost summer clothes. The castle experience was excellent. They have recently finished a long project to get it where it is today. Instead of just wandering around a ruin with occasional signs saying what each pile of rubble used to be you go from exhibition to exhibit inside various intact parts of the castle. The theme is underwater archaeology of Turkey. The modern form of which was pioneered here by George Bass. He started doing it scientifically instead of just dragging things to the surface and mostly wrecking all the artefacts. There were very good audio displays and it was good to have the experience broken up between castle and museum. The old town areas of Bodrum are really nice with a mixture of souvenir/fake watch shops and old bars and restaurants in little squares.

We leave today to go back to Didim until another good weather window lets us out again.