Orak Island (Orak Adası)

Aegean, Turkey 1 tours visit here

Orak Island (Orak Adasi) is a small, uninhabited island lying off the southern shore of the Bodrum Peninsula, in the Aegean waters between Bodrum and the mouth of the Gulf of Gokova. It has no settlement, no roads and no harbour town, so it is reached only by sea: almost everyone who swims there arrives on a day boat out of Bodrum or on a gulet working its way along the coast. The draw is the water. The island is rocky and sparsely vegetated, and the pale stone seabed around it gives the sea an unusually clear turquoise colour, with visibility good enough to make out the bottom well below the surface. Poyraz Bay, the best known of its sheltered coves, is where boats normally drop anchor for swimming and snorkelling. The shore here is rock rather than sand, and there are no facilities on the island itself. Orak is usually one stop among several on a full-day boat trip from Bodrum, with the time at anchor spent swimming, sunbathing on deck and eating aboard. The boat season runs through the warm months, roughly late spring to early autumn, and mornings tend to be calmer than afternoons, when the prevailing summer wind of the Aegean picks up.