this is our first attempt at this blogsite, so please bear with us. we've got a good internet connection right now, so we're trying our luck.
we are currently on a hard stand in a marina in marmaris, turkey. we expected to go out of the water for a few days to scrape and re-paint the bottom. we discovered that we had diaper rash (it's the only way we can describe it to non-sailors) on our hull.
it was a messy enough job that we were didn't want to fix it ourselves, so we called in the specialist doctors (Sadetin and Soffit) to fix it for us.
well, they took off the diaper (scraped down to, and then sanded, the fiberglass),
aired out the bottom (dried the hull) and then applied the cream (epoxy barrier coat).
because some of the blisters were in the gelcoat, we had to raise our water line as well. this meant that they had to carefully tape new red and white lines above the bottom paint, and a new red line on the top of the hull as well.
we also found that we had a piece of line caught in our cutlass bearing that needed to be removed. we have a line cutter on our shaft, so we figure we must have cut through a fishing line somewhere between new zealand and here, and part of it stayed with us.
we've also had a problem with our electric windlass jamming since the caribbean (4 years ago), so we removed it and had it serviced as well.
needless to say, we were torn up inside and out! the windlass motor is in the cupboard in our v-berth, so everything had to come out of the cupboard and off the v-berth.
where'd it go? well, in the main salon of course!! 
after 2 weeks we are finally able to sit on both settees again. WAHOO!the workmanship in turkey is A-1. it's expensive, but oh-so-worth-it. we've been able to find products here, or have them made for us, which we've not been able to do for a long time. the people are wonderful. they are friendly, kind, and extremely helpful. if they don't have the part you need, they will sometimes hand deliver you, literally, to the shop that might have it. we'd had this same kind of helpfulness in the pacific, but it's nice to see it here as well.
the not-so-good part in the marina is the way they plug in in the yard. they put the raw ends of 2 cords together, then they put an empty plastic soda bottle over the top to keep them dry. hmmmmm.
they also hold the boats up with logs and pegs. most of the boats, like in this photo of our neighbor, are like that, but for some reason you will notice in our photos that they put us on a regular holder as well.
finally, most of the live-aboards have to use metal ladders to get on and off the boat. not us. when they placed our boat in the yard, linda happened to see a set of wooden steps "next door" so she asked if we could have them instead - the guy shrugged his shoulders and said "of course".
we expect to pay extra for them, but only if someone tattles on us, however, they've been wonderful. linda "sweeps" them every night with her mini brush. our stairs have gotten some very jealous stares.i know this is a lot of information for a first blog, but that's our life on the hard. if this goes through and works okay we'll backtrack a bit and fill you all in on where we've been and what we've done in the last 5 years - a shortened version of course.
we're feeling, and looking, much better now, thank you, and we're ready to go back in the water in a couple of days.
so, stay tuned . . .
linda and michael
