Bodrum’s gulets, and the coves the wind allows

A working boat, and an exile

A gulet is a wooden boat, broad and round at the stern, usually with two masts, the larger one aft. The word came into Turkish from the Italian goletta, a schooner, and at first named the rig rather than the hull. With a square stern the same hull is an aynakıç, though both now go by gulet.

Since 2024 the Bodrum gulet has been a registered geographical indication: to carry the name, a boat must be built, every stage of it, in the district. The same registration is candid about the engine, saying that a gulet runs mainly under power. The sails go up when the wind and the captain agree.

What the hull does well is coves. A long keel, weighted along its length, lets it come in close and lie at anchor in shallow water.

Pleasure came aboard with an exile. In 1925 the writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı was sent to Bodrum for three years over a magazine article. He left after about a year and a half, came back of his own accord, and lived in the town some 25 years in all. He wrote as Halikarnas Balıkçısı, the Fisherman of Halicarnassus, after its ancient name.

He befriended the fishermen and the sponge divers, and took his friends out on their boats, mostly into the Gulf of Gökova. Among those friends were the writer Sabahattin Eyüboğlu and Azra Erhat, a translator of Homer. Erhat’s book about the trips, published in 1962, was called Mavi Yolculuk, the Blue Voyage, and a week on a gulet still goes by that name.

The wind decides

From about mid-May to mid-September the Aegean has the meltem, the summer wind from the north and north-west, at its strongest in July and August. It usually keeps a daily rhythm: lighter in the early morning, rising towards noon, hardest in the afternoon, easing by night.

The day is built around it. Swim in the morning, while the water in the coves is calm. By the afternoon the boat should be in the lee of a headland or an island, with the land between you and the wind.

The captain also watches the big day boats, which mostly keep to the same few routes; the coves they pass by are the ones worth having. The wind cannot be known weeks ahead, which is why the order of the coves is settled on the morning itself.

The shape of a day

The boat leaves from the harbour below the castle. A first cove and a swim before the wind gets up; lunch cooked on board and eaten slowly under the awning; a second cove for the afternoon, or a longer stay in the first if nobody wants to move. A day on a gulet that is yours alone comes with its captain and its cook, and a route chosen with them for the season and the wind. You are back in the late afternoon, as the castle catches the last of the light.

The castle deserves a morning of its own, on another day. The Knights of St John began it early in the 15th century and named it for St Peter. When they strengthened its walls, they took stone from the ruined Mausoleum, the tomb of Mausolus that was counted among the Seven Wonders and gave every later grand tomb its name. Of the tomb itself only the foundations are left, a few streets back from the harbour.

Inside the castle is the Museum of Underwater Archaeology. Among much else it keeps the cargo of a merchant ship of the 14th century BC, found off Kaş in 1982 by a sponge diver from Yalıkavak, on this peninsula.

A day, or a week

The Blue Voyage proper is usually a week aboard: a cabin, the same faces at every meal, and the wind’s timetable instead of your own. Some people would happily never come ashore; others are restless by the third morning. It is worth knowing which you are before committing to a week of it.

For most people one day on the water is enough, with perhaps an evening as well: by boat to Gümüşlük for sunset, round the peninsula to its western tip, where the ruins of ancient Myndos lie just under the surface. June and September are the easier months: the meltem is usually gentler than in July and August, there are fewer boats in the coves, and by September the sea has had the whole summer to warm.

If you go

When

May to October; the sea is warmest from July to September.

Getting there

From Istanbul, about an hour and a quarter by air, to Milas–Bodrum; then about 36 km by road to the harbour.

How long

A whole day on the water. Two or three days in Bodrum leave room for the castle and an evening at Gümüşlük as well.

Worth knowing

Shoes usually come off on deck, so bring sandals you can leave at the gangway, and a soft bag rather than a hard one.