The Whole Boat to Yourselves: Private Hire in Dalyan

Most days on this river are shaped by one plain fact: the boats leave the quay within about an hour of each other, and move as a loose convoy until the middle of the afternoon. There is nothing sinister in it. It is what happens when thirty crews all agree, sensibly, on the best order to do things in.

Hiring the whole boat is chiefly a way of stepping out of that convoy. You are not buying a better river or a cleverer itinerary. You are buying the right to be somewhere at the hour when nobody else is, which sounds like a small thing and turns out to be most of the difference.

Where the river actually gets busy

The delta is a great deal bigger than the crowd on it. On an August morning there are more boats than you would like at three specific places and almost nobody anywhere else, and knowing which three beats any amount of advice about avoiding the season.

The pinch points are the jetty at the thermal pools, the short reach of water beneath the rock tombs, and the river-mouth end of Iztuzu where the boats land. All three fill for the same reason: the standard day trip visits them in the same order at roughly the same hours, because that order genuinely works.

Everything in between stays quiet from morning to evening. The reed channels swallow boats whole, and open Koycegiz is far too large ever to feel crowded. So a private day earns its keep at those three points, and almost nowhere else.

A rough map of the day

A shape rather than a schedule. Weekends, public holidays and a cruise ship calling nearby rewrite all of it, so ask your skipper what he expects on your date rather than trusting a table written months ahead.

The hour with the engine off

What people describe afterwards is almost never a stop on the list. It is the twenty minutes somewhere in the channels when the skipper shut the engine down because somebody asked, and the sound of the delta arrived: reeds shifting, water knocking against the hull, a heron objecting to a boat two hundred metres away.

A shared boat cannot really hand you that. Stopping in a channel for no reason costs the day twenty minutes, and there are thirty people aboard, several of whom have a table booked. On your own boat it costs only the twenty minutes, and to our mind it is the best use a charter here gets put to.

Birds are the reliable part of it. Egrets, herons and a harrier working over the reed tops are usual rather than remarkable, and kingfishers turn up often enough to look for. A turtle in the river mouth happens too, though nobody, ourselves included, is in a position to promise you one.

Look at the deck before you look at the route

Groups spend the planning arguing about stops and then spend the day sitting down. The deck decides more than the itinerary does, and the questions worth asking are dull ones.

• How much of the deck is shaded at two in the afternoon, which is not the same as at ten.
• Whether the lavatory works, and whether anyone has looked at it recently.
• The swim ladder: how far it reaches below the surface, and whether somebody who is not agile can get back up it.
• Somewhere flat and out of the sun for whoever has no intention of swimming, because on most family days that person exists.
• A corner a small child can be put down in for an hour without being stepped over.
• How you get aboard at the quay, if anybody in the party is unsteady on a plank.

None of this appears in a listing and all of it decides the day. Ask about the particular boat rather than about boats in general, because they vary more than the photographs suggest.

You are hiring a person, not a hull

The boat is the visible part and the smaller half of what you are paying for. The skipper decides where it is safe to swim, how close he takes the hull to a bank, and how much of a day gets rescued when the weather has other ideas.

He is a boatman rather than a licensed guide, and that is worth settling before you push off. He knows the channels from memory and where the bottom shelves gently enough for a four-year-old. He knows considerably less about the archaeology on the far bank, and a licensed guide at Kaunos is a separate arrangement to make when you book.

Tell him what the day is for in the first five minutes. A party that wants to swim four times and one that wants to be back in time to change for dinner are asking for different days, and he cannot read either off a booking form.

What money cannot move

Chartering the boat buys you the timetable. It does not buy you the rules, and a handful of those shape the day more firmly than anything you decide.

• Iztuzu is closed between 20:00 and 08:00 during the nesting season, whoever happens to own the boat.
• Nests on the sand are staked and signed, and you do not walk inside a marked area.
• No umbrella and no sunbed on or beside a marked nest.
• No powered speedboats within one kilometre of the beach.
• No lights and no flash photography on the sand after dark.
• The river carries a speed limit and the channels are shallow and narrow, so your boat comes home at the same unhurried pace as everybody else's.

Iztuzu is a protected nesting site, so these restrictions come from national law and the wardens on duty apply them to a chartered boat exactly as they do to a shared one. The season opens and closes a little differently each year, which is why the boards posted at the entrance are the version that counts on the day you go.

What moves the figure, and where it lives

There are no prices on this site, and that is deliberate rather than coy. What a whole boat costs moves with its size, the number of hours, the date, whether lunch is part of the arrangement and whether a crew is being asked to start at seven in the morning. A figure written here would be misleading long before most people read it.

What is useful is the shape of the arithmetic. You are buying the boat rather than seats, so the figure per head falls as the party grows while the boat is indifferent either way. Two people pay a clear premium for privacy. Ten people are comparing something much closer to the shared figure, with the whole day arranged around them.

Live figures for a whole-boat day are kept alongside the trip listings on our sister site, and the booking is completed there as well. Keeping one set of numbers in one place is the simplest way to make sure nothing you read in advance disagrees with what you are told at the quay.

When we would tell you to take the shared boat

Two of you, on a short holiday, wanting to see the river: take the shared boat. It gives up very little, the deck is sociable in a way an empty one is not, and we have watched plenty of couples enjoy a full boat more than they expected to.

The same goes for anyone who quietly likes being told what happens next. A private day is a run of small decisions, and by the fourth of them somebody has to choose between a second swim and getting back in time to shower. Some parties find that liberating and others find it work.

We do not think the whole boat is the better product. It is the right one in a specific set of circumstances: a group large enough that a shared deck becomes a negotiation, a day built around a nap or a wheelchair or a birthday, or a second visit by people who already know which two hours of this river they actually want.