Bareboat Yacht Chartering in Turkey 2012

This book is intended to be a source of information for those who wish to charter yachts and Turkey. As time goes on I will be using the same model outlined in this book to provide your chartering information or other popular sailing areas.

I have organized the charter areas of this book geographically from the north to the south of Turkey along the coast starting in Ayvalik and ending with a short description of Finike. I have not included the sea of Marmara and any charter fleets around Istanbul, first of all I don't know if there are any and secondly having sailed in the sea of Marmara except for a visit to the marble quarries on the north side of the island of Marmara, I can't imagine why anybody would wish to sail in this area. The water is murky and it is full of jellyfish. If this area remains of interest to you, then I would suggest chartering a boat out of Ayvalik and working your way north through the Bosporus and into the Sea of Marmara.


The most popular charter destinations are along the central west coast of Turkey from Kusadasi to Kekova. The charter bases and charter companies that serve these areas will be covered in detail. This is not a pilot book that may be a project for the future but for now this book deals with the ins and outs of charting a bareboat and the companies providing the boats and services. There are quite a few personal anecdotes mixed in to try and entertain the reader.

My introduction to charter sailing came in the early 1980s when I had the opportunity to join a friend on a Peterson 44 which was located on the island of Raiatéa in the French Polynesian islands.

The company we charter from was called South Pacific yacht charters and was founded by Lynn leisure who lived strangely enough in northern Utah. As I understand the story Lynn had served the Mormon mission in French Polynesia and seeing an opportunity after his mission he returned to the country and established if not the first, then one of the first yacht charter companies. Later on Lynn started a yacht charter company in Tonga and afterwards he was considering starting a yacht charter company in Fiji but before that occurred the global yacht charter company The Moorings bought him out and Lynn retired to northern Utah. Lynn may have taken his business models from others who pioneered the yacht charter business but I'm not certain of this. Regardless of whether he was the first or not the model that was developed seems to be fairly consistent to the model used today.

The reason I had this opportunity to sail on a South Pacific Yacht Charter boat was because a friend of mine was building a house for Lynn Leisure in northern Utah. Lynn offered two weeks on one of his boats as partial payment for some of the services conducted in the construction of the house. My friend is an adventurous traveler but at that time was not a sailor so he invited me and my wife to join him and his wife aboard the boat and teach him how to sail. It was my wife's first experience sailing and has served as a foundation for me building my own boat and becoming a cruising sailor. We had a wonderful time my wife had a wonderful time it is one of our favorite memories.

Warning!!! Yacht chartering is a gateway drug to yacht ownership.