Day Skippers!

Nice-London-Horley-Brighton-Northampton-Cambridge.

Post number two is some days later. 18 days later in fact. Currently in England in the university town of Cambridge. An above average place, very bike friendly with bike paths winding through herds of grazing moo cows by canals.

Since France we've spent time with Anne's brother and then her dad and then at her mum's.
We left Anne's mum's place almost abruptly when, after some idle research and chance phone calls, we said yes to a sailing course out of Brighton. More fast research on hire cars and we found ourselves the next day seated in the classroom of Mustang sailing on a working farm some 15 miles out of Brighton. Turns out it was a stroke of luck as there are many shonky sailing schools about but these guys were genuinely good in all aspects.

So now, the big news is, after nine days of sailing theory and practice, Anne and myself are now internationally certified Day Skippers. We return to the classroom next Monday to do our vhf radio course, a certification I am led to believe we may need somewhere in the Med.

Did I mention the Med? There are many and varied plans afoot for sailing in the Med. All of them revolve around my friends Bill and Linda who are sailing their yacht 'Lati,' currently in Sicily and Bill's brother John who has a yacht in a marina in Croatia which eventually needs relocating to Bulgaria many orders of magnitude of adventure away. We are in the slot to facilitate the move although there are many known unknowns on the way.
Enough for this post. Some photos so far.

With this free blogsite it is completely hit and miss where the photos end up. Very annoying.

In the middle of Moustieres

Classy splurge in Moustieres

Moustieres stroll

Flying over French nuclear power.

Anne's Dad's Place during the haybaling

Anne and Instructor Pete

Anne mixes it with warships, Portsmouth

TIGBILFTWTTTJ

 

 

Creeping into marina Lymington

TIGBILFTWTTTJ

Now that would be a flashing green lateral mark and Southampton in the distance

Waiting for night sailing

View from berth Gosport/Portsmouth

There Is Great Beer In Life For Those Willing To Take The Journey!

You have to start somewhere

  And this it.

Welcome to day one of this blogging caper.

Zip Crisis on way to Changi Airport. Cab booked, no pressure.

24 days since we left Brisbane Australia on our travels after 589 days straight working on my house to finish a ten year project. We finished it, it's beautiful, it's a triumph and if it gets rented soon I'll be a lot happier and have some travel money. Now, finally, with all the work behind me it's on to less labour intensive pursuits.

 

 

 On arrival in France via a one night stay with Raj in Singapore we got straight down to business and went shopping for superyachts in Antibes. Anne settled on 'Eminence', a very tidy 78 metre number. 14 guests, 19 crew. No chopper pad.

 I chose Anastasia, a bit smaller at 75 metres, 12 guests, designed inside and out by an Australian designer, bought for 200 million by a Russian oligarch who recoups some of the cost by renting it out for $700,000 a week.

 We wandered along with Michael who chatted up, in french, the odd yachtie  with a for sale sign on their yacht in order for me to do some further research.

It was only as we were leaving that I came across the ideal little number.

The Grand Bleu Vintage, a 95ft long, 22ft beam, aluminium yacht. 8 guests 4 crew. $60,000 a week.

Now I know this is a bit more than we usually pay for our yearly houseboat weekend, but gee, what an upgrade!

Twilight

French lettuce crisping technology

Cote D'Azur

Apres Dinner stroll. Saint Paul de Vence

Lunch and Rose @ Michael and Emma's out of Nice

That folks, is the end of my first ever blog post.
It's been a time consuming learning curve and one can only hope it gets easier as the road leads on.
For those of my friends who haven't noticed, you can subscribe to an RSS feed to get automatic notifications of future posts.
I leave you with the words of this pic til next time.

Stay tuned.
Love Pete.

Singapore Beer Wisdom