Kısmet

The story behind the name

Kısmet

Sadun Boro was born in Istanbul in 1928 and grew up on the Marmara shore at Caddebostan. He started out in a rowing boat and owned his first sailing boat while still in high school.

After Galatasaray High School he moved to England in 1948 and graduated in textile engineering from the University of Manchester.

In 1952 he and an English friend sailed the 11-metre Ling from England to the Caribbean — his first ocean passage across the Atlantic. Serialised at the time in the newspaper Cumhuriyet, the story was published in 2004 as the book "Bir Hayalin Peşinde" (Chasing a Dream).

Kısmet, a 10.5-metre ketch, was laid down in 1963 at Athar Beşpınar's yard in Salacak. In 1965 Boro set off on the dream of his life, a voyage around the world, with his German-born wife Oda Boro — and Miço, the famous cat they picked up in the Canary Islands. Their three-year voyage was serialised in Hürriyet and later collected in the book "Pupa Yelken".

Between 1977 and 1979 the family sailed the Caribbean and the US East Coast with their daughter Deniz, then eight years old.

Settled in Bodrum from 1980, Sadun Boro campaigned to protect the bays of the southern Aegean such as Gökova and Göcek, and wrote widely about his love of the sea and nature.

Kısmet can be seen today at the Rahmi M. Koç Museum in Hasköy, Istanbul, on the site of the old Golden Horn shipyard.

Sadun Boro, the first Turk to circumnavigate the globe in his own boat, passed away in Marmaris on 5 June 2015 at the age of 87.