A big day on the boat today because Piers joined us last night and enjoyed his first day in Turkey by… working on the boat all day. His fingers are raw because of paint thinner and he’s already got himself sun burned.
We continue to work down a seemingly endless checklist of things to to do. Many of the systems on the boat are old and haven’t been used for many years, so we are fixing, replacing, and removing a lot of stuff. We are opting for reliability and simplicity over comfort, which means several major systems are going into the dumpster, such as air cond, fresh watermaker, and probably the backup autopilot. All of these are complex systems with hoses, electrical connections, pumps, switches that run all over the place and make it difficult to figure things out around the boat. Not so if they’re in the dumpster.
We fired up the main engine about an hour ago which was an exciting moment. We’ve now dumped about 25 black garbage bags of crap, pardon, stuff that was left onboard by Gibby the prior owner… He loved to keep things around and did not value the extra storage space quite as much as we do. We are keeping a lot of the equipment he used to sail around the world in 1998, which is saving us huge amounts of money (emergency equipment, extra sails, tools, etc).
Tomorrow is Friday so we’ll check out the nightlife in Marmaris. Looking forward to our first sail sometime in the next week.