The question Jesus was asked in today’s gospel of St. Matthew, which is used this day in all Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran churches the world over, “How often do I forgive my brother?”

I ended up going to the same church as last Sunday. The same Nigerian priest. It turned out that the pastor is Romanian. He had answered me in  Italian, last week. Today is much cooler. Fall is on its way. The city, spread over the hills, bridges, ferry boats, sea breeze and pastel colors remind me so much of San Francisco. This was a great stop. I am anxious to get on the road again.

I managed to get my propane on Wednesday evening. But why is it so difficult for the world to decide on a universal valve? The Dutch could not fill my South African Bottle, in Romania I had to have a reducer machined to fit the Dutch bottle and now the Dutch bottle had to be junked and a Turkish bottle bought…. Anyway I have propane for the next 6 months at the cost of about $40, including the appropriate pressure valve. This one, silver color, is not as ugly as the dark red Dutch bottle. On the way out of the river with my rowing dinghy I stopped to say hello to Hans Tilly, the German I met in Rousse on the Danube. He was moored in the river. I’d seen him last in Varna on the Black Sea.

On Tuesday I sanded out a spot on the hull where I had collided with a hard object. The 1 1/2″ spot grew to 10 x 12″ before I had a firm base to the old epoxy coating. Somehow the epoxy had separated from the hull and spread to this large an area. I had no evidence of it when I resanded the hull last May. There was a smaller spot on the port side. I expoxied it on Tuesday and put a two part urethane primer on today, another coat tomorrow, then the finish on Monday.  Yesterday I started on the last of my teak trim finish projects, the cockpit coaming and put the second layer of Cetol on today.

My other project was to make up a 31 minute slide show of my best pictures of the trip from Amsterdam to Sulina, on the Black Sea. You can find it at www.cometosea.us/albums/albums/Danube.wmv  It took for ever to find a a half way decent wireless connection to upload this. The wireless connections here are atrocious. I bought a Vodafone USB modem for a hundred bucks including a month or so service. This should give me cellphone coverage acces to the internet when I am anchored or moored in remote spots. But I alreasdy have a problem with it since the instructions are in Turkish and the pass word failed. Got to find myself a Turkish speaking boat waif.

Today “Orca” an American sailing yacht is to arrive here from the Black Sea. I plan to take the ferry across the Bosphorus tomorrow morning and go to mass. This time I’d like to spend it with the French brothers and sisters at 11 0’clock near where I went to the English mass, last Sunday. Then I plan to head south towards the Turkish South coast in Anatolia, and check out my wintering options.