‘Wintering’ the boat - Turkish style

by Hope Fotherbess on 15 May 2006 Sometimes, whether you want to or not, you have to abandon your boat for long periods of time – maybe you’re going away, maybe it’s winter. It’s a little like abandoning the baby, with all the similar worries. Will she sleep happily through the winter night? Will the baby-sitters do a good job? Or will they fall asleep in front of TV and not hear her distress? Will some catastrophe occur in your absence? Will you come back to find her dead/sunk?

There’s a school of thought that says, ‘Take her out of the water, put her on stilts, so you can close the systems down and avoid any concern. It’ll dry out the hull properly and avoid osmosis.’

The opposing school of thought says ‘A boat is happier kept alive, she is meant to float, not be stuck on stilts – she’ll be better floating.’

We belong to the latter school, and anyway, we like to visit her during her long night, to check she’s okay and still breathing. At the moment (winter 2005/6), we are in Turkey, so the European gales are something to be wary of, reaching 80 knots at times.

The other aspect of wintering our baby in Turkey is that here they use the weirdest small support sticks for securing the boats on the hard, which look as if one small knock or blow would bring them all shattering, baby and all, to the concrete below.

It takes over a week of work to get her ready for the winter. Here are our tasks:

· Sails: We drag them out on the shore and hose them down with fresh water, examine them for damage and wear. We have the sailmaker present during this last procedure to show him the various issues. Then we roll them up and bag them and send off for repair.

· We tie the halyards away from the mast so that they can’t clatter and wear during gales. (Some people say you should get them out of the sunlight altogether by using sacrificial lines, but we haven’t gone to this extent)

· Our boat has a lot of varnish, both inside and out. Often we discuss leaving some of the sun-affected areas bare, to season in the sun, but somehow can’t bring ourselves to do it. So there’s always varnishing to do – this time it’s the toe rail, 6 coats. Grab rails 4 coats (not enough)

· We wash the topsides with vinegar, or very weak oxalic acid, which takes away any rust stains that emanate from the older deck fittings

· We fill the heads with vinegar, which helps to prevent the accumulation of scale and marine growth from the pipes. Our aft head is a standard pump head, so we also pump vegetable oil through it a few times, to oil the pump fitting and keep it in good order. (Loo dressing, as opposed to salad dressing)

· Our for’d head has an old fashioned Electrosan installed. There is a pickling process that must be completed to abandon this baby.

· The watermaker must also be pickled, to prevent damage to the diaphragm when not in use for more than a week.

· We replace the normal mooring lines with heavy winter strength mooring lines with springs for extra flexibility. We put flexible plastic piping over all the chafing points on the lines. We move the boat further away from the wharf to allow extra moving room.

· We have installed into the engine-raw-water-intake a three way valve allowing us to flush the engine cooling system with fresh water. No more do we need the engine started once a week to keep her in good condition.

· We have two outboard engines aboard, a 2.5hp and an 8 hp. We send both away for servicing.

· We remove all sheets and ropes, soak them and wash them in detergent water on shore in buckets, dry them off and stow them below decks.

· Then, of course, there’s the final cleaning: We polish the stainless steel with Emergel from New Zealand, scrub the deck – across the grain to preserve the teak, which is on its last legs - hose and wash all the internal carpets, upholstery and bedding, defrost the two refrigerators, clean and scrub inside and out.

· We now know, that when we arrive back in summer, we will have forgotten both the stowage and provisioning locations. So now is the time to make a written inventory, throw out stuff (‘Do we REALLY need this?’ ‘Yes, it might come in handy!’ ‘What for?’ ‘Well, you never know…’) and re-stow to make room for a clean arrival in summer.

· Finally we fuel up ready for the summer - it’s important to leave the tanks full, put in the biocide that keeps the fuel in good condition - , kiss goodnight, and drag ourselves, exhausted and unhappy, away for the winter, leaving her with the Avyalik Marina babysitters.

Footnote:

There are a few issues I haven’t mentioned, and most of them revolve around one word - CATS.

CATS, whether you like them or not, are the answer to a lot of problems on marinas. CATS keep the birds off the boats, the cockroaches out of the bilge, and the rats out of your electrical gear.

We have been in Turkey for 15 months, and I have never seen, in all that time, a cockroach or a rat, or a bird on a boat in a marina, and the answer can only be the CATS. There are millions of cats who are owned by everyone, not anyone. They mostly seem well fed, unafraid, and are fed and stroked by the local population.

They are not ‘strays’, (I don’t think there’s an equivalent word in Turkish) and when we recount the process in Australia of collecting and ‘putting down’ of ‘stray’ animals when they are not collected, we are met with a unified, horrified concern.

The other that comes to mind is SECURITY: Well, of course in Turkey, the whole damned population is so HONEST, that we rarely lock our boat, and if we do, it’s the other cruisers we’d be worried about, not the Turkish people. So security, especially in this 24/7 marina in Ayvalik, staffed by a truly caring community of young Turks, is not something we give a moment’s thought to.

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