Those Hard To Reach Places

Well done to the engineers. We reached Istanbul on schedule.

Like narrowboats, ships need touching-up every now again.

Unlike narrowboats, you can't just kneel down on the marina pontoon and slap some more blacking on.

Istanbul is a lovely city, but they don't have proper mooring fenders.

Most ports have large pneumatic fenders as shown below. I've often fantasised about fitting some ballast on the bottom of one for stability and making a real boat out of one (Little cabin on the top ?).

Well they're big enough (look at the man on the quayside for scale) and you couldn't damage one by hitting things with it, could you ??

Istanbul only has tractor tyres and these left lots of black rubber rings on our lovely white paintwork.

With this is mind, we had to put the painting crew down in the next port.

The ship is largely self-sufficient and maintenance is no exception.

An aluminium raft with an electric outboard is kept onboard for those little waterline tasks, like slapping white paint over dirty fender marks.

When its all done, there's nothing else for it, but to fold the raft up and get it back on board.