One of the Facebooks groups that I follow is the Airfix Modelling Club. If you don’t know, Airfix is one of the companies that makes plastic kits of aircraft, military equipment, car, ships etc etc. I spent a lot of my teenage years building models of Spitfires, tanks and other assorted war machinery plus naval vessels and sailing ships. One of the predominant themes in the Facebook group is “The Stash”. Some of these guys are serious modellers and constantly…
Brian and Karen, Drake Paragon, Jamie and Liz, Dan and Kika, Nike, Barry, Johan and Malin, Troy and Pascale, Shaun and Julia, Dylan Winter. These names, and the fact that this is a sailing blog, the chances are high that you will know who these people are, or have watched some of their YouTube videos. Yes, they are the people that appear in Sailing channels and are some of the ones that we watch on a regular basis. Of course…
It’s 2019 already and the year has started off with boat jobs (of course), but more importantly, things got fixed. My workplace shuts down for two weeks each year over the Christmas/New Year period and I the opportunity to stay on La Mouette for just over a week to do boat jobs and to just enjoy being afloat for a few days. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to take the boat out but as there was a huge amount…
So this is Christmas and what have you done Another year over, a new one just begun It’s official, this is the last blog of 2018! Another year almost done and dusted. I seem to spend a lot of blog time discussing how time slips through our fingers, and this year seemed to go extra fast. It’s gone before you even know it. There is a lot to be said for just savouring the moment and enjoying things. We get…
I have been feeling very guilty because the boat hasn’t been out of the marina for a while now – since the end of September. To be fair, we have had plans to go for a sail, but always been snookered by the weather, and then there have also been pipe band engagements and family commitments. But we have been out on the boat albeit in the marina and actually spent a night on it. Just doing boat maintenance, enjoying…
Getting things crossed of the never ending to-do list of maintenance items for La Mouette seems to be very sporadic. They are not regular events, nor are they in order of importance. They simply get crossed off precisely when they mean to – to paraphrase a famous wizard. And it’s a bit like that. During the week or fortnight prior, you plan a particular job and yet, when the weekend finally arrives and goes, the planned job is still on…
The title of this blog comes from the pen of the famous Scottish poet, Rabbie Burns. The actual line from his poem “To a Mouse” is “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft agley”, or, in slightly more modern English, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”. Which is what is going to happen this weekend. We had laid plans for a weekend of sailing starting on Friday with a flex day off work, however, I…
Now that we are well into the journey of owning and restoring an old sailboat, it didn’t take long to realise that some parts of boat fixing come into the category of “dark arts”. Whilst a lot of jobs on the boat are pretty straight forward, albeit taking double the amount of time scheduled, and sometimes leading onto other jobs, or double the cost originally estimated, these jobs are run-of-the-mill stuff. It is a boat after all and things always…
We measure the progress of our planet around the sun by looking at a bit of paper stuck to the wall, or by looking at those little electronic devices that can also tell you what day of the week it is and in what particular month that day falls. Each revolution of the earth around the sun is called a year and we don’t just mark the passing of each year by looking at bits of paper but by events…
The last blog listed quite a few jobs that needed doing on La Mouette. The toe rail and winch maintenance just to name a couple. Sadly, those jobs are still on the to-do list, as are some fibreglass repairs, however, they will get done and hopefully soonish. Someone has stolen my diary again and used it to book up a lot of the empty weekends, so boat repairs and maintenance hasn’t been possible. But we did manage to get a…