Four years on a rock teaches you exactly two things. One: you can live without almost everything. Two: whatever you are holding onto had better not slip, because there is nobody coming.

The Volkl Contour is a replacement grip — it goes on the bare handle in place of the factory grip, not over the top of it — and its distinguishing feature is the contoured surface.

Rather than a smooth sheet of polyurethane, it carries a raised, textured profile that gives your fingers something definite to sit against, which is what people mean when they say a handle feels "located". If you dislike the vague, slippery feel of a worn stock grip, this is the fix.

It is comfortable, tacky and slightly cushioned, it builds the handle a touch fuller, and it ships with adhesive backing and finishing tape. Start at the butt cap, overlap about a third, keep even tension, and do not stretch it thin trying to make it reach.

Sinop is the great lesson in being surrounded by water and making the best of it. The fortress guards the narrow isthmus joining the rocky peninsula to the mainland, fortified since Greek colonists from Miletus arrived in the seventh century BC and rebuilt by everyone since.

Inside those walls, the Sinop Prison was established in 1887, using the citadel's defences to create Turkey's most notorious penitentiary — sea on three sides, escape considered nearly impossible. I have opinions about that. The Alaeddin Mosque is the city's oldest major Islamic monument, founded after the Seljuk sultan Izzeddin Keykavus I took Sinop in 1214.

And Balatlar was raised around the second century AD as a Roman bath or palaestra before becoming a Byzantine church and monastery.

One wrap runs you everywhere from a flat-calm morning inside the harbour wall to a Black Sea afternoon that arrives sideways, and by the way, it is also perfect for the walk along the fortress wall, where the stone is wet, the drop is real, and holding on is not a figure of speech.

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