Summertime Voyage

SHAKEN, NOT STIRRED. mmmmm..I 'd rather have a VFR M..So we remain clamped awaiting events to unfold. It’s a good lesson in patience ...not one of my strongest features, I think most people would agree. We are now dealing with matters out of our control so have to seek some Zen in the life around us. There’s a rhythm to the boatyard. Starting at about 8am various mopeds and cars start trundling in, salutations exchanged and the workers get busy. Radio Turkey blares out a variety of fairly wailing female voices, interspersed with hard core rap. We are sitting in a dust bowl, so as the activity mounts, clouds of stuff billow about, reaching a peak when the refuse truck crashes around and we are in full desert storm. Of course this makes my efforts at cleaning and polishing totally useless, but does explain the teams of men constantly polishing all the mega yachts around us. It continues endlessly throughout the day until the stainless steel twinkles and the gelcoat glows by afternoon...

I have to admit to being somewhat neglectful of the blog. We have been a bit busy, and distressed by our circumstance. I am also struggling with the practicalities of Blogspot. I have tried to edit the last blog a few time to make it more readable, but that seems not to have worked.  So I apologise to any English teachers out there for the thousand word paragraph, When we arrived a week ago the weather was a bit inclement. A bit windy and parky. Since then it has settled down into cool mornings, hot afternoons and balmy evenings. Winds getting up in the afternoon to 15-18 knots. Perfect sailing weather. This only makes our current circumstance even more painful. We had been unceremoniously plonked in the centre of the yard well away from any other boats. I am not clear if this was because of concern that bad fortune is contagious or whether it we were being placed in the centre of the amphitheatre so that all could witness the tearing limb from limb. We were still trying to get our...

The past couple of years have been strange for all of us. I don't think in my lifetime I had anticipated the way things would develop. The decline of liberal democracy, the normalisation of subjective truth, the rise of populist fascism, pestilence floods and war.  Oh and the existential crisis of climate change. Not to mention a whole range of normal personal and family calamities.  So what to do, hey - ho, lets just go sailing.  After a false start last year we finally set off from the UK back to Marmaris where Summertime had been sitting in the yard relatively immune to the major world events, being made of plastic, but subject to a significant lack of routine care and attention.  My return to Marmaris was therefore with a degree of trepidation as to what awaited. What spite could a boat deliver following 18 months of emotional neglect.  I had booked flights for the middle weekend of April. This was the first error. Being a-religious I had failed to clock ...