Spindrift's Web Diary - Istanbul Wanderings

Istanbul Wanderings

Spindrift

David Hersey

Sun 17 Jun 2012 17:15

17/6/12

When we got back after our outing on Tuesday I downloaded an Istanbul app for my iPad and magically navigation in the maze of the city became possible. The built in GPS is brilliant and you can see your progress walking the wrong way very quickly.

We’ve spent a few days doing the obligatory sightseeing, which is exhausting. When we first arrived there was no wind and the temperature was well up the the 30s or 90s. There are zillions of tourists and I wish we’d come a month earlier. Two or three apartment block cruise liners in the harbour disgorge several thousand, lemmings all fighting for the best views.

Yesterday the prevailing NE wind arrived big time and its been blowing force 5-6 sometimes 7 continuously.

Friday evening we saw an hours worth of a ritual “dance” involving 6 dizzying Dervishes which was fascinating. When we got back to the boat Vagellis was sitting in the dark with the news that the batteries had boiled and we had a big problem. The 8 large Gel Batteries are 8 years old now and I almost replaced two of them in New Zealand. When the boat was build I specified and paid extra for Sonnenschein Gel Batteries. We didn’t discover this until the boat was in Antibes that they had supplied ordinary truck batteries so David Moody had to come to France with his credit card to sort it out. I was back in the UK and naturally assumed we now had the Sonnenschein Batteries originally specificied.

The ones I ordered in New Zealand were never delivered because of a cock up with the supplier which is just as well and the ones we actually have are Exide Gel batteries and you certainly couldn’t mix different types. Things settled down and I was vaguely aware of decreased capacity but I didn’t really worry about it. I was planning to change them this winter.

Anyway it turned out that the problem of overheating and steaming was with the first 4 batteries in the set. There are 8 x 12 volt batteries in series pairs to give the 24 volts required. As it was a Saturday and outside help unavailable, I decided to try swapping the bad 4 with the good 4 and running with half the number of batteries. It took a couple of hours to do a wiring diagram of the original version and the new version and to mark all the connecting cables. Vagelis then had to hump them into the new configuration --and they weigh 75 kilos each. When we switched on nothing went bang. And in fact the new configuration seemed to accept the charging correctly. It took a few hours for the battery charger to drop to “float” but so far all is looking good. Obviously this version will have less capacity than originally but I reckon we’ll only be down about a third of what we’ve been living with as I think the bad batteries might have prevented the good ones from charging properly. Anyway at the moment it looks like we will have to run the generator more than normal and we’ll need to be careful of consumption. Thanks to the internet, I have located a firm in Piraeus which actually stocks the ones we’ll need. Will phone them on Monday .

So we’ve been to the Blue Mosque, Ayios Sophia, and spent a couple of session at the Topaki Palace complex and yes we saw the dagger and the 88 carat diamond from the film Topaki. in fact we’ ODed on Diamonds, Emeralds, Rubies, Mother of Pearl etc etc. The Harem was interesting. In full swing it had 4500 inhabitants. There were more eunuchs than concubines.

Today is Greek Election day so after our afternoon outing we’ll be glued to the box to see what’s happening.

I will attach some snaps from our wanderings.