The battle turned on the wind. For three hours on 19 July 1790, two fleets traded fire at long range across the mouth of the Kerch Strait, neither able to land a decisive blow, the Russian line and the Ottoman line running parallel and stubborn under a steady breeze from the east-northeast. Then the wind swung to the north, and everything changed. The Russian commander, Rear Admiral Fyodor Ushakov, seized the shift, luffing his ships up and driving them straight at the enemy. In the confusion of reversing course two Ottoman vessels collided, some turning one way and some the other, and the fleet that had come to carry an army to Crimea found itself fleeing southwest before the guns of Sevastopol's fleet.
This was one clash in the long Russo-Turkish War of 1787 to 1792, a struggle over the northern shores of the Black Sea and the fate of newly Russian Crimea. The Ottoman Empire meant to reverse that loss, and the plan that summer was ambitious: land an army on the Crimean coast and reopen the war on land. Everything depended on the fleet getting through. Ushakov, based at Sevastopol, heard that Ottoman ships had been sighted off southern Crimea and sailed on 13 July to find them. Six days later his fleet lay anchored at the mouth of the Kerch Strait, the narrow waterway the Turks knew by the old name Yenikale, sending privateers ahead to scout. At ten in the morning the lookouts reported a sighting, and half an hour later the Ottoman fleet came into view from the east, sailing toward the strait and the coast beyond it.
Ushakov formed his heavy ships into a line and, noticing that the Ottoman battle line held only their largest warships, detached six frigates to form a second line and thicken his formation. From roughly noon until three the two fleets fought at a distance without result, cannon smoke drifting over the water, neither admiral willing to close. The wind ended the deadlock. When it backed to the north-northeast, the Russians turned into it and bore down on the Ottoman line, and the tail of the enemy fleet came under real pressure at last. The Ottoman admiral broke off and steered away to the southwest, his faster ships carrying him clear. Firing ceased around seven in the evening. The Russians gave chase through the night, but by dawn the swiftest Ottoman vessels had slipped beyond the horizon.
For a battle that changed the course of a campaign, the human toll was mercifully light on the Russian side, twenty-nine men killed and sixty-eight wounded, with little damage to the ships themselves. The dead on both fleets were sailors of their age, drawn into a contest of empires on a stretch of open water, and their loss was real for all that the tally was small. What the day decided was larger than the fighting suggested. By turning the Ottoman fleet back at the strait, Ushakov denied the empire its chance to put an army ashore in Crimea, and the peninsula stayed beyond the sultan's reach. The victory helped cement Ushakov's reputation as one of the great sailing admirals of his era, a commander who understood that a battle at sea is often won not by weight of guns but by the man quickest to read the wind.
The battle was fought near 44.90°N, 37.00°E, at the mouth of the Kerch Strait between the Crimean and Taman peninsulas. From altitude the narrow strait linking the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, with the city of Kerch on its western shore, is the defining landmark over this water. Nearest airports are Kerch on the Crimean side and Anapa (URKA) to the southeast; expect haze over the strait.