TGE Yacht · Gulet Building, the Kaş Run, and Boat Costs

Nobody drew this boat.

The frames go up before anything goes on paper. The lines are lifted off the finished hull afterwards, for the registry.

The master builder sets the midship frame, sights along the tops at plank level, and takes it down again if the run of it looks wrong. The plank that will not lie fair is the only check anyone runs.

Planking without a drawing →

A shipwright on the hard beneath a half-planked wooden hull, looking up at the frames, the hull towering over the figure — A 24-metre hull on blocks between the road and the water at Bodrum. The figure standing under it is the scale.Photograph · TGE Yacht

A tenth of her value a year

It is the figure everybody on the quay repeats, and it is roughly right. What moves inside it is where she sleeps and how long she spends out of the water.

What she costs to keep →

Lift-out, and the fortnight ashore

The travel lift, the pressure wash, the blocks and the two weeks of work that only happen when the boat is out of the water.

A Göcek pontoon against a town quay

What a marina berth buys that a town quay does not, and the gap between the two prices across a season.

Two hundred miles, west to east

Bodrum to Kekova, with Rhodes offshore. Nothing on this coast is more than a morning’s sail from the next thing.

Bodrum · the yards and the castle

Göcek · twelve islands

Fethiye · the town quay

Kaş · deep water close in

Kekova · Simena, and the stonework

Rhodes · across the border

Clear shallow turquoise water over submerged cut stone blocks and a partly drowned staircase at a rocky Mediterranean shoreline, seen from just above the surface — Kekova, over the stonework — a Lycian town went into the water here after the second-century earthquakes. You anchor above its staircases.Photograph · TGE Yacht

Aerial view of Göcek's harbor town with boats moored between forested mountains — Göcek and the twelve islands — small enough to sail in a week and sheltered enough to do it badly, which is why the charters start here.Photo: Göcek · Wikimedia Commons

The wind gets up at noon, so you leave at six.

A week aboard

Three crew, a shopping list, and a route drawn round the wind

A gulet week runs on a captain, a cook and a deckhand. The division of labour is older than the tourism it now serves — and the food comes aboard before the guests do.