Food Coma Strikes Again

For a Sunday, a lot of work got done. Mike was busy at it all day and I was doing jobs here and there. But to honor the day, we headed to the bar around 5 o’clock, just in time to order a cheeseburger. Then walked to the floating dock where we were lured in by their big lounge pillows. Again, for the second day in a row Mike succumbed to food coma from a large meal and a couple of beers.

Food Coma

My craving for comfort food resulted in the end of our work for the day. As I was trying to decide what sounded good to eat, nachos came to mind and Mike put me on a mission. To my surprise, they actually ended up pretty good despite being forced to use Doritos. And the beers along with it at 3 in the afternoon went down pretty easy as well. So well in fact, that we strayed from our usual one beer quota and had a second. That’s all she wrote. As you can see from the picture, Mike was sent into a food and beer coma, barely to arouse the rest of the day.

Serena Misses Her Bathroom Because...

She doesn’t have to walk down a ladder to use it.
She doesn’t have to walk across a boatyard to find an open one.
She doesn’t have strangers washing their underwear in her sink.
She doesn’t have strangers trying to open the door (has anyone heard of knocking?).
She doesn’t have strangers casually chatting outside her door while, you know…
She isn’t tricked into thinking there is toilet paper.
It doesn’t cause her to start the day off in a bad mood.

Time Warp

Where are the weeks going? Time has been passing by amazingly fast. One day it’s Sunday and then it’s already at the end of another week. I don’t think time has ever gone by so fast for me. And the marina is feeling a bit like a ghost town. The boat yard has cleared out, no one is on ‘The Net’ anymore with their social events or stuff for sale. Everyone is out sailing…
But even though we are still on the hard, we had a really good day, probably the best one in awhile. Our moods were high and felt like we got a lot of work done. And what felt really good was getting the first coat of top paint on the dodger and roll bar. They are sparkly white, at least for now. We also spent another evening listening to music and making dinner. It was almost like I could breathe a little easier and enjoy the progress we have made. And I found myself getting really excited about the end result of all this work. If all continues to go as planned, we are going to have ourselves one awesome boat!

The Galley is Open!

The morning started off with rain which kinda threw off our plans for painting on the first coat of polyurethane. Bummer. I took advantage of not being able to sand and varnish (not too disappointed I have to say) and started to clean up the cabin a bit. The head which is 99% done ended up getting used as a storage room so tried to make it a bit more functional. Also did some cleaning in the aft cabin so we could sleep back there once again. But yesterday, we discovered that the hatch in the aft cabin has a lot of bubbles around it on deck. And that means… rust, which I found a bunch of while taking off one the small headliners that needed replacing. It looks kinda bad and it’s hard to restrain ourselves from just chipping away (it’s kinda fun and satisfying) but that feeling would quickly turn into ‘what have we done?!’ as big holes and an even bigger project would surely emerge. So we are just ignoring it for now and saving it for a later day.
Mike spent his morning getting the table mounted back into place and it feels like we are getting our boat back! The galley is open, we have floors to walk on, we have our table and bed again. The big inconvenience now is that I took the companionway ladder away yesterday to varnish since it was bare wood in places and covered in big paint drips. It makes getting in the cabin a little difficult, especially when the box we’re using as a step topples over, but hopefully it won’t be too long. And our friend, Ishmail, stopped by to do some more carpentry work for us. I’m not quite sure what he thought about my varnishing job on the floors, but told us that he charges 1000 Euros minimum for varnishing. Look how much money I saved us! I think I can buy those pair of Birkenstock sandals now (smile).
And in the evening, we quit working a little earlier than the past several nights so we would have time to enjoy the evening…make dinner and watch a movie. Despite some earlier and on-going feelings of frustration and tension, the evening felt much more light and promising with a little normalcy and comfort returned.

Need...More...Coffee...

The most dramatic part of our day was drinking the last of the 5# bag of French Roast coffee we brought with us. Besides that tragedy, the day was uneventful. Maybe a few more moments of feeling completely overwhelmed, not feeling that we are ever going to be done and just generally being tired of working on this boat. Other than that, it was more varnishing, deck prep (translation: epoxy paint, then putty, then sanding…ughh…now more bare metal showing, more epoxy paint, more putty, more sanding…) But we did manage to get primer on the roll bar and dodger! And tomorrow we hope to get the first coat of polyurethane paint on which means that Mike gets to start mounting stuff….like the wench (allright, so this is how I first spelled it and Mike thinks it's funny), rope clutch, exhaust fans for the engine, box for navigational equipment, maybe even the windlass!

Scroll to the Bottom!

It was a bit of a hectic morning with giving John and Aysel a lift into town and trying to get some needed errands done all before the car was due back. And I didn’t envy them closing up their boat and dealing with the marina beaurocracy. But we managed to get them to the otogar on time and squeeze in a quick phone call to the solar panel guy so Aysel could give her much appreciated Turkish translation one last time. After a sad but hopeful goodbye (we hope to visit them in Usak, Aysel’s home town, in a couple of weeks!), we were able to squeeze in a stop by Doyle Sails and put a down payment on a new mainsail!
Then it was back off towards the marina with plans of work, but it was time for a siesta instead. We found ourselves falling asleep on the day bed in the heat of the day. But it actually proved beneficial because when we managed to get ourselves moving the temperature was cooler and we worked happily until 8:30pm, only stopping because the day was growing dark. Despite an overall feeling of being productive, there were some moments of discouragement as well. We had another guy come by to give us an estimate for a storm dodger and bimini. And like the first guy, he didn’t seem eager to start work with us. He couldn’t understand why we wanted to start this process now when we had all this work left to do, thinks we should wait a couple of weeks. But our fear is that we will be one of those people who get stuck in the marina waiting endlessly for their canvas work to be done. We have the dodger, measurements can be taken, what is the problem? He also told us that a window in our dodger should definitely be able to open for circulation. Especially while we are on anchor or it will be unbearably hot. That was our original plan but we somehow let Mehmet, our metal guy, talk us out of it. And when we changed our minds after he put the dodger in he said it would be too complicated. Now looking back on it, we think he talked us out of it because he doesn’t know how to install windows. That, plus the windows panes are still sitting on the ground which he left us to take care of. Just another thing to try and solve.
But on a good note, our ‘perfectionist’ and nice neighbors on Foxy Lady (why do so many people think that is a good name for a boat?) gave us some beautiful (and expensive) material! They had it all sewn into covers for their beds but then changed their minds and don’t want it anymore. And it looks like there is enough to re-cover our whole settee. We will see when we get around to that project…


And here are our new floors!!!

Before...

After!