Back to Finike via Istanbul



Wintry Istanbul

20^th March We decided to break our return to Turkey with a long weekend in Istanbul with our friends Melanie and Derek.  The weather wasn’t ideal – we ended up wandering around the beautiful Topkapi Palace in torrential, freezing rain – but we managed to pack a lot into two days and visited some beautiful mosques.

The stunning Suleymaniye mosque

The highlight for me was definitely the food. On the first day Melanie and I did a very good cookery course where we prepared a four course authentic Turkish meal. The cookery school doubles as a restaurant, so Cliff and Derek were able to come along afterwards and enjoy the products of our afternoon’s work. The next day we joined the locals on the banks of the Bosphorous and had a delicious lunch of freshly caught mackerel, barbecued and stuffed in a baguette. On our final evening we found a restaurant near our hotel in Sultanahmet that served traditional Ottoman recipes – an excellent end to our short break!

Karniyarik (stuffed aubergines) ready for the oven

Melanie attacks the Lavash - a tasty 'balloon bread'

We arrived back in Finike on 23^rd March to find ourselves surrounded by snow topped mountains. We had hoped it would be a bit warmer than Istanbul, but Spring was late arriving so it would be another couple of weeks before the t shirts and shorts came out.  Meanwhile there was a long list of jobs to be done before we could start sailing again.

The yard at Finike with snow topped mountains behind it

Spring finally arrived in Finike

After the usual polish and antifoul, Cliff got to work trying to fix the connection to our external VHF speaker. Unfortunately, in the process of trying to fix the problem he managed to blow the fuse in our autohelm unit, which can only be accessed by removing the holding tank (for non-sailers, that’s the tank that stores the toilet waste). Sorting it out was a long, horrible job, but at least the tank got a good cleaning while it was out! Next Sandpiper had her mast taken off so that it could be fitted with a new divider to stop the lines tangling inside it. It was very strange seeing her ‘topless’.

Sandpiper looking naked without her mast

 7th April While Sandpiper was in the yard having the mast fixed we made a last minute decision to have the teak decking in the cockpit replaced. If we had appreciated quite how dirty this job would be we would have arranged to move off the boat. Instead, for next three weeks we lived in a haze of wood dust and grit, and were reduced to crawling in and out of the front hatch when we wanted to get on or off the boat. But it was definitely worth it, as each plank of the new wood decks was hand crafted and the final result is  excellent.

The carpenters get to work removing the old teak

Each piece of teak was cut to fit then held by weights as it was bonded to the deck