There hasn't been much going on since my last post. (Which apparently I misnamed or left out one numbered post or something - all fixed now) The weather has been very wintery with some nights at minus 1. the rest of Turkey has suffered a lot worse - Istanbul airport closed and a terminal roof collapsing under snow and the inland areas not far from here down to minus 14! Friends went off on a trip to Cappadocia in their camper and had to get dug out and towed. We plan to go in May when it's nice. We were playing with the idea of joining a Black Sea Rally but may not now, what with Russia and the Ukraine. It would have been a two month rally that we thought was a bit long for mostly day sailing. Many of the ports are small and struggle to accommodate larger boats or any quantity. We had planned to go in a group that had mostly catamarans and the organisers seemed less than enthusiastic.

We have occupied ourselves with a few unnecessary things like getting nice wooden boxes made for our drinking glasses (always hard to accommodate on a boat). Peter found a store that sold Turkish made jeans that fit really well and cost equivalent $AUD11.00 so bought nine pairs in different colours. They grow a lot of cotton here and the fabric is really good quality. We got more cushions made for the fly bridge. After a scary story/experience one of our fellow sailors had with a barber, Peter plucked up the courage and went to one. What happened to John (who has next to no hair and takes him 8 minutes in Australia) was that he was in the seat for an hour and a half and ended up with a nose and ear hair wax, eyebrow pluck, neck and face massage, face mask and scrub then finally a trim! His wife filmed it on her phone - hilarious the looks on John's face as each process commenced and progressed, especially the waxing…….

Turkey has formally changed the spelling of the country's name. It is now Turkiye. It seems that they didn't like all the rather less than positive search results for people typing in Turkey. So now with the new spelling you go straight to proper search results for the country - I'm sure there will be teething problems.

So far we have not hired a car and have been using taxis that are very cheap and easy. We call our "pet" one "No Brakes". Partly because early on he had such worn brake pads that we stopped using him till he got them replaced and partly because of the driving! The speed limit signs we have decided are actually MINIMUM speeds not maximum. We still have not worked out the roundabout rules.

Nearly all the jobs, maintenance repairs etc are completed now ("6 Months in a Leaky Boat" has been our theme song) and we are ready to head out when the weather improves. We shouldn't really be feeling too hard done by with some of the commissioning that was not done on Entre Nous - the poor German next door flew to France to collect his new boat only to find they'd made the wrong one!!