Göcek Yachting: Charter Risks, Marina Prices and Buoys

I recently did my IYT practical training in Göcek. Nobody ran aground while I was there, which was perhaps the only good news. We did have several close-quarters situations over the course of the week, though, and once we had to take emergency avoiding action even though we were under sail and had right of way: under COLREG Rule 18, a power-driven vessel must keep out of the way of a sailing vessel. The man on the catamaran under power apparently did not know that. Or he did, but decided it did not apply to him.

A small thing. But small things like this add up to a picture that stayed with me more than the training itself. Turkey's yachting business looks profitable, yet it is coming apart at the seams. And when a business is coming apart, everyone involved does the same thing: they pass the hot coal of costs to the next person down the line. Marinas pass it to owners. Charter companies to charterers. Charterers to other people's hulls. The state to everyone at once. At the end of the line is the person who simply wanted to spend a week under sail and, bad news, ends up footing the bill.

Who Are All These People on the Water?

Let's start at the bottom, with the very catamaran we had to dodge. Mediterranean charter works like this: someone with the bare minimum certification is handed a boat, and from there they learn in live waters. This is not a Turkish peculiarity; it is a widespread affliction.

Case study: Croatia, where there are five times as many boats. In Croatian statistics on rescue operations involving recreational vessels from 2010 to 2019, grounding was the second most common category: 459 of 2,362 accidents, with sailing yachts the vessels most frequently involved. In 2023–2024, groundings moved into first place, accounting for 64 of 366 interventions. (1) Local operators say the same thing plainly: boats are chartered to people “after a course lasting 21 days, give or take,” and reports of groundings come in every day. (2)

Against that backdrop, Turkey is a small market, but not an empty one. Booking Manager's 2024 database listed 487 bareboat charter boats in Turkey, compared with 2,270 in Croatia and 2,504 in Greece; Booking Manager has not published more recent country-level figures. (3) In 2025, the Turkish association of charter operators estimated the country's share of Mediterranean commercial yachting at 5–7%, compared with 30–35% for Greece and 20–25% for Croatia. (41)

Case study: A bay for 700, with 1,500 boats. Akdeniz Koruma Derneği estimates that more than 1,500 boats a day lie at anchor inside the Göcek islands in summer, while a Ministry of Environment study put the area's limit at 700–800. Many stay for weeks without moving from the best spot. (42) In TÜÇA's project documentation, the bay's total capacity after the installation of mooring buoys is 2,006 berths, 864 of them in coves. (43)

In other words, this entire small market is compressed into three places—Bodrum, Marmaris, and Göcek—and in Göcek you can feel it on your skin. Crowded anchorages, narrow passages between islands, and every other boat proceeding as though there were nobody else around.

The Charter Company Passes It On

A charterer clips someone else's topside or outboard motor, and the charter company deducts the cost from the deposit. That is normal. What happens to the next customer is not: the boat is damaged, their week is ruined, and the contract is written so that the company owes almost nothing.

Case study: What the small print says. Standard terms from a Turkish charter company require any grounding to be reported to the base immediately; repairs are deducted from the deposit; and if the damage exceeds the deposit, the charterer pays the difference. (4) Under the standard logic of MYBA-type contracts, when a boat breaks down, the client is first offered a replacement, then a pro-rata refund for the days lost, and only if no replacement is available, a full refund. (5) Turkish lawyers say it plainly: in peak season, a clause requiring notice of a technical fault within 24 hours leaves the client with no real alternative. (6)

There are also specifically Turkish details that foreign charterers usually do not know. The limitation period for a bareboat charter claim in Turkey is one year under Article 1246 of the Commercial Code, not the general ten years. (7) Foreign-currency contracts between residents are restricted, which affects how payments are structured in the first place. (6) And if it comes to litigation, the case will most likely have to be heard in a Turkish court.

Marinas: Scarcity as a Business Model

Now let's move one level up. If charter companies pass the coal to their clients, marinas have nobody to pass it to: they sit at the top of the food chain because there simply are no berths.

Case study: The industry association's figures. According to YATED, an annual berth for a 25–30-metre yacht in Turkey costs €35,000–55,000, rising to €65,000 in popular marinas; occupancy is 90%. (8) YATED chairman Murat Bekiroğlu says occupancy has reached 100%, while lira prices tripled in 2023–2024. A 7–8-metre boat costs 200,000–250,000 lira, and its annual berth costs 70,000–80,000. Small-boat owners pool their money to pay fishing harbours and hire a watchman there. (9)

This is exactly what it means when people say “the berth eats the boat”: a third of the boat's value every year. Not in six months, but enough to make you sell a boat you cannot afford to keep.

Case study: Göcek versus Barcelona. One month's berthing for a 30-metre yacht: Barcelona, €2,000; Göcek, €20,000. One night for a 42-metre yacht: Monaco, €650; Bodrum, €750; Göcek, €1,200. (10) The reason is not service but arithmetic: the Ministry of Transport lists 61 operating marinas in Turkey, with 18,261 berths afloat and 6,467 ashore, while Italy, France, and Spain each count their places in the hundreds of thousands. (10, 11)

What does a market do when the price bears no relation to the supply? It leaves. Turkish yachts under the Turkish flag berth on the Greek island of Lemnos for €4 a day because on Gökçeada, 12 miles away, the foreign-vessel tariff is 3,000 lira a day. In Greece, a 10-metre boat pays €30–50 a night; in Montenegro, €20–30. (12) Turkish associations themselves acknowledge that the northern European yachtsman who once lived here for six months at a time and spent money in restaurants and boatyards has been lost. (13) Those who remain anchor in coves and, rather than pay 1,250 lira for a pump-out, discharge their holding tanks straight into the water. Göcek is named first on that list. (14)

Where the Overheating Came From

I have a theory about why things have overheated so badly right now. Since 2022, a large portion of the Russian yacht fleet has moved to Turkey: Turkey did not impose sanctions, Russians do not need visas, and the lira is cheap.

Case study: A timeline of the move. March 2022: Eclipse berths in Marmaris and Solaris in Bodrum, both yachts avoiding Greek waters. (15) April: the 73-metre Cayman Islands-flagged Clio anchors in a bay near Göcek. (16) In summer 2023, according to the trade press, Russian owners were moving boats of up to 30 metres en masse from Spain, France, and Italy to Turkey; at the same time, the cheap lira attracted Europeans, for whom keeping and repairing a boat here had become good value. (17) That same year, Milliyet reported an increase in Russian-flagged yachts in Muğla's marinas. (18) The YATED chairman said that Russian buyers shut out by European brands had switched to Turkish yards and the Turkish flag; “the middle segment from Russia and Ukraine bought homes here and is buying boats.” (9)

There are no direct statistics for “visa-free entry → boats,” but the connection is logical: demand rose sharply, marina supply did not grow at all, and in this situation every berth costs whatever the wealthiest person in the queue is willing to pay. Everyone else pays their rate or leaves.

The State: Ecology as a Cash Register

Here the coal is passed down from above. I looked for an answer to the question of what the state did when it saw that there were no places left and prices had taken off. The answer: it introduced paid mooring buoys.

Case study: Göcek, 2026. Since the 2026 season, Göcek's coves have operated a mandatory paid mooring-buoy system, managed by the Turkish Environment Agency (TÜÇA) through the operator ÇEYAŞ. Anchoring is prohibited within the system's zones. (19) The system covers almost every cove in the bay, with only a couple of exceptions; each cove is charged separately and payments are non-refundable: decide to move next door, and you pay again. The harbour master's office and coast guard enforce the rules. (20) The official aim is to protect Posidonia seagrass, which anchors tear out by the roots and which grows only centimetres a year. (21)

I have nothing against Posidonia. It is the history of the scheme that bothers me.

Case study: How it was arranged. The first tender for buoys in Göcek's coves failed in 2022 amid local protests. Afterwards, an article was added to the law governing TÜÇA, giving it the right to install and operate buoys “in places under state control—in coves.” In February 2025, a tender was announced for a 10-year marina concession in Ayten Bay; a former minister had once suggested a benchmark of €100 per night. (22) Back in 2022, Fethiye City Council wrote that the existing mooring eyes were free, the new ones would be paid and run by private operators, and 400 additional places would exceed the coves' capacity; the five-tonne concrete blocks would themselves damage the seabed. (23)

In other words, an environmental project twice rejected locally was pushed through by amending the law and handed to an operator. This is not an isolated story.

Case study: Kalamış and Alaçatı. Istanbul's Kalamış marina was awarded to a Koç Group company as a 40-year concession for $504 million—after the 2014 tender collapsed because of a court ruling on the development plan and the 2017 tender attracted no bids at all. (24, 25) For Alaçatı marina, the Court of Accounts recorded that the lease expired in 2017, the municipality did not call a tender, the facility continued to operate without a contract, and the rent was not calculated from gross revenue as required. (26) I do not know what this is: an inability to count, or an ability to count extremely well. The fact is that Turkey's shortage of berths is not being solved by building marinas; it is being monetised through buoys, concessions, and tariffs.

Customs: The Yacht as Hostage

Another link in the chain is control: the Transit Log, customs, the harbour master's office, and the coast guard. Ashore, people tell the same story about them: at the slightest issue, the boat is detained and put into storage, bureaucracy makes it impossible to retrieve quickly, and after a few months the storage bill catches up with the value of the boat. I do not know whether that is true, but I did see abandoned boats under penalty.

Case study: Two years later. A German couple entered Turkey at Çanakkale in May 2022, passed through the Bosphorus, and were told by border guards at İğneada that they could leave for Bulgaria, but “without a stamp.” In 2024, the boat arrived at Istanbul's Ataköy Marina, which sent them to an agent. The agent billed €500 for the service—and produced receipts for €4,400 in fines, a two-year ban on entering Turkey, and an order to leave the country immediately. (27)

Three agencies with overlapping powers—the harbour master's office, the coast guard, and customs—may act separately or together, and each has the authority to impose a fine, detain a boat, or cancel a Transit Log. (28) Then a mechanism kicks in that owners are not usually told about.

Case study: A boat's expiry date. Under the Marine Tourism Regulation, if an owner does not renew a berthing contract and does not contact the marina within two years of its expiry, the boat is deemed abandoned and becomes subject to the Customs Code's liquidation provisions. (29) In practice, this is what it looks like: the Bodrum National Property Directorate put 38 vessels up for auction on 1 October 2025, followed by nine more seized vessels on 22 December, including a 22-metre motor yacht with a starting price of 1 million lira; an auction in Fethiye took place on 1 July 2026. (30, 31, 32)

To be fair, this is not unique to Turkey. In Civitavecchia in June 2025, customs seized a 33-metre Marshall Islands-flagged yacht that had remained in port for more than 18 months beyond the temporary-admission period: €2.5 million in unpaid duties and around €12 million in penalties. (33) In Greece, a yacht longer than seven metres without paid TEPAI tax is prohibited from moving until both the tax and the fine have been paid. (34) The difference is that in Turkey, you also have three agencies, a paper Transit Log, and berthing charges while you wait for a decision.

Boatyards: The Defects Remain, but the Queues Are Gone

And if you consider buying a boat, yet another player joins the hot-coal game: the boatyards. A new boat arrives with equipment that does not work, the warranty does not get it repaired or replaced, and delivery dates slide like the completion date on a new-build house.

Case study: The Lagoon 450 bulkhead. Around 1,100 hulls were built between 2010 and 2020. By August 2021, 155 owners had contacted the yard about deformation of the forward bulkhead; the yard released a repair kit and covers labour and parts under warranty, while out of warranty it covers the parts and “considers labour on a case-by-case basis.” (35) Sun Fast 30 One Design: a year after the first deliveries, owners were publishing lists of defects, Jeanneau replied that these were the normal “teething problems” of a new series, and delivery dates had been pushed back more than once. (36) A Hanse owner in May 2025: he waited 18 months for the boat, hatches with a manufacturing defect are being replaced under warranty, “it just takes a long time.” (37) The good news is that the “year-long queues” belonged to 2021–2023; now the picture is the opposite. In spring 2025, Bavaria put the build time for a new boat at around four months and said that almost every model was available from a dealer. (38) In summer 2025, HanseYachts was cutting 190 of 740 jobs in Greifswald because of falling demand. (39) In its report for the first half of 2026, Groupe Beneteau writes of a sharp decline in orders since March. 40

What to Do If You Are Going Anyway

Find the clause in the charter contract covering a replacement boat in the event of a breakdown, and the currency used for settlement. If there is no replacement, ask in writing what will happen.
Photograph everything during check-in, including the hull around the waterline and the propeller, with a timestamp.
If it is your own boat, open the Transit Log on entry and close it on departure at a port authorised to do so. “Without a stamp” is not a departure; it is a fine two years later.
In Göcek, budget for the buoys and plan your coves in advance: changing coves means paying again.
Ask for the berthing price a year ahead, in both lira and euros.
Have a new boat inspected by a surveyor before accepting it, even if the yard is well known.
And keep a watch even when you have right of way. Especially when you have right of way.

The Short Version

Turkish yachting will not collapse as long as someone is willing to pay. But the coal has already reached the end of the line: northern Europeans have left, Turkish owners of small boats are hiding in fishing harbours, large yachts are moving to Greece, Montenegro, and Tunisia, and Turkish associations themselves acknowledge it. The next one to be handed the coal will be Turkey itself.