BACK ABOARD ENVOY ON MARMARIS

We had a long, but event-free journey from Auckland, and arrived back in Marmaris, southern Turkey, on Saturday morning, finding that everything aboard Envoy, out of the water on the hardstand was pretty how much we’d left her four months ago - clean, dry, and so far no surprises.
As I filled in Envoy’s log on Saturday for the first time this year, I noted that was our 744th night aboard Envoy since we started our Med cruising.
The coming week will be hectic as we work to complete all out-of-water jobs before Envoy is launched on the 10th. After that we’ll still have plenty of routine annual preventative maintenance jobs to do, but no time schedules to meet and no pressure.
The first two nights aboard we still had the full storage cover over Envoy, and it’s a bit like sleeping in a tent as it’s dark and you can’t see outside, so it was good to take off today.
World oil prices have risen about 15% this year, and with the rising cost of diesel we’re very happy to own a very economical full-displacement vessel. Diesel costs about NZ$2.79 per litre here, while petrol costs about NZ$3.12 per litre! For our North American readers that’s gasoline at about US$9.72 per gallon. This year we expect to cruise about 2,400 miles and use about 3,200 litres of diesel, including for the generator. We like to keep our fuel tanks more than half-full both to reduce condensation in the tanks, and so that if any major problems develop in a country or region we can just point Envoy in another direction with enough fuel to cruise over 1,000 miles.
TRAVEL
When travelling to the boat from NZ there is always lot of “stuff” to take with us. This is mostly spare parts etc for the boat, but also items that are difficult to obtain in Turkey, like re-sealable plastic bags. Our family and friends help us out a lot by bringing stuff over for us when they visit, but this year we had to bring over 30kg of parts and heat insulation just to re-build the Lugger engine dry exhaust. Travelling economy class Korean Air was great. The standard check-in luggage allowance is 20kg each, plus cabin baggage of 12kg each, plus a laptop, briefcase or handbag. We made a special request to Korean Air to allow us an extra 10kg each of check-in at no extra cost, to which they agreed, and that meant that in total we carried about 95kg between us. We had a nearly 12 hour flight to Seoul, with a complimentary overnight stop in an excellent 4-star airport hotel. Next day another nearly 12 hour flight to Istanbul, where we’d booked an airport hotel for our short stay – arriving there at 9.30pm and leaving at 5am.
Turkish Airlines (part of the Star Alliance) were also great. For our one hour flight to Dalaman - they only charged us about NZ$41 for our 20kg of excess check-in baggage and allowed us aboard with all our additional cabin baggage. Some airlines are just anal about cabin baggage, making their customers really p’d off.
Weather here is cloudy with some showers, daytime temperature in the low 20’s, and night time about 14.
TECHNICAL
An engineer, Yilmaz, spent the whole of today re-assembling the Lugger engine dry exhaust system using the parts we brought from NZ, and all went well. While the engine was drained of coolant we checked the cooling system hoses, and replaced the two main ones which are at least six years old and showing signs of surface cracks and reduced flexibility. The last thing you want is a cooling system hose failing at sea.