Envoy slowly comes to life

After six solid but enjoyable days working on the boat we’re making some progress.
When we arrived last Monday everything looked basically OK, but it was hard for us to quite know where to start. Now we are pretty comfortable living aboard on the hardstand with power, water supply from a hose (but no running water on the boat yet), refrigeration, lpg stove, microwave, and all electrics operational.
Yesterday Di went into Marmaris, about 30 minutes by dolmus (bus) for about $5 return and got a new SIM card for our Turkish phone. This is Turkcell, similar to NZ Telecom. Cost is quite high at roughly $50 for an hour of local calls or $50 for 25 minutes of international calls. We’ll be sticking to Skype (free WiFi at the marina).
Di says things have really increased in price here since 2007. For example a tube of Colgate toothpaste cost $10. We might be making our own!
Been busy re-familiarizing ourselves with where everything is. Envoy is incredibly well equipped with spare parts, tools and chandlery, but you have to know where to find something when you need it. We've completed dozens of jobs and during the day it’s a bit chaotic with different tradesmen coming and going. Demir Marine employ about 40 staff and we’ve met about 10 so far. Over here they are very much specialists. They have engineers, electricians, painters, riggers and laborers without much crossover, whereas in New Zealand an engineer would for example happily paint a reconditioned starter motor. The guys are really friendly, although communication is difficult as only a few speak English.
All except one of the sea cocks are back in place, and today I checked all 15 of them, making sure I could remember where they are all located, check the installations, check the bonding wires had been connected, and that they were all in the closed position (except for bilge pump) ready for launching.
Tomorrow is a big day as the Naiad stabilizer seals get replaced (fingers crossed the seals are the right ones!) This is a big job as it involves completely removing the stabilizer fins, and if they don't go back on correctly we're gonna leak!
The hull is nearly ready for antifouling and I imagine that in another week we should have a pretty good idea of a launch date. So far there are no major unpleasant surprises (although a few minor ones) and we just need to keep working away and ticking stuff off the list.
On the social side we’ve so far met four couples we met during our 2007 cruise, and it’s been great to catch up with them again.