What to do on long winter evenings #2.

Well you could add a new dish to your boat cook book, such as this lovely Tart Tatin.

Best done in temperate latitudes though, too far south and the butter will melt...

Out of the oven, and then















...turned out, ready to eat. Yum!

De-gloving Incident !

I heard alarming news when I ran into one of my sailing buddies the other day!

Their partner had had a nasty de-gloving accident on their boat at the end of last season, when load suddenly came onto a rope wound around their hand. A painful accident that resulted in a lot of subsequent medical treatment, not a small amount of which was surgical.

Unfortunate and distressing - I don't know the details, but in any case would be hard to be judgemental, but two things jump out :

Firstly - wear gloves at any opportunity, but absolutely always when dealing with mooring or anchoring. We try to do this on Annabella, but  it's always when the action starts to hot up that one is tempted to take short cut and give the gloves a miss. We have tried to overcome this by having a lot of rigger style work gloves in the cockpit pockets and lockers. At less than £2 each its not expensive. So far so good.

What if we had that accident at sea ? If there was any luck in the original incident it was that it happened on the pontoon, so medical attention was very prompt.However, you wouldn't have to be very far out to sea for attention to be two, three or four hours away. And off shore !

We will find out what the first aid would be + update the post as soon as we can !

What to do on those long winter evenings...

Can't seem to stop doing boat stuff...

New canvas cover for the wheel

...that should keep the birds off !

.That's what I call a Christmas stocking

Look what Santa brought!

Some books here to get into

The weather in Holyhead

Well, hurricane Ophelia passed through yesterday - it was a tense time for all of us, and perhaps especially for those who couldn't be nearby, not that we could have done anything for the boats on the moorings if we had been.

Overnight the wind speeds were apparently recorded upto 76 knots.

Friend and sometime crew Michael visited the harbour this (Tuesday) morning, luckily he was able to catch a lift on the launch and make good the only problem on our boat, which was the mizzen halyard which had blown loose. When we talked he told me could see 7 headsails plucked out of their roller reefers and blown out. I'm sorry for the damage and the distress caused to other boat owners.

*

Over ten years ago, when I bought my first boat, I asked Jon Crisp, my erstwhile sailing mentor, to look over her. As he left, he said one last thing, "...put a sail tie around the roller reefer, you never know when the wind will pluck it out whilst you're away and things will be bad." I wish I remember as well everything else he'd said and we'd learned, but mostly that he was still with us, to have the opportunity to retail our own tales of sailing and the sea...

New log book on the way:

So - we used up all the store bought log book, so I made us a new one. You can have a look at it here:

http://www.blurb.co.uk/books/8120511-sailing-yacht-annabella-log-book

They are exceptional value if you happen to have a sailing yacht called Annabella - or if you just want to follow our adventures!

Sun versus the bilge pump

The sun has come out and three of the four jobs have been done - replacing the bilge pump.

Now where's the nail brush?

...at last, the new cockpit table

Now, where's the ice and the lemon...

...now with AIS on the deck plotter.

One night last year, on first watch on a murky night, it struck me how much more comfortable it would be to have AIS targets showing on our Garmin deck plotter - rather than just via the remote mic display from our Standard Horizon fixed VHF set.

Garmin deck plotter + Standard Horizon remote microphone for AIS fixed VHF set

Well, of course we could.
 It just took a lot of motivation, a bit of spare time and the helpful reference of Carolyn Sherlock's "Boat Galley" blog, which had helpfully worked out which wire to connect to which and what settings to make..

Overall - took about 30 minutes, and worked 1st time! :-)

Just to confirm "St Davids" is not dangerous - it was just within 1nm of us. I have made a mental note to turn to AIS CPA alarm off in the harbour and on again at sea - maybe a note in the log...

Really pleased and, of course, thanks to CS and the Boat Galley blog.

Success with bread !

Following on from the mixed success on our recent passage from the Isles of Scilly, I think we have fnally cracked the beer bread recipe and produced a loaf not only worth eating, but actually quite nice!

Instructions are:
Preheat oven - our's is a "Nelson" which was set to mid heat which is  6 on the dial, but I don't  know if this relates to gas mark at all. Move shelf to lowest position.
Oil a small bread tin and prepare a small piece of cooking foil.
Mix 1+1/2 mugs of self raising flour with 1 desert spoon sugar and 1/2 spoon of salt in a jug or bowl.
Add a "stubby" (small bottle) of cheap lager and mix thoroughly then pour into tin.
Put tin into warmed over, when it starts ot rise cover with the foil.
We cooked it for 90 minutes then tuned of the over, tipped it out of the tin and put in for another 45 minutes
Timing is the key thing and this works for us but is the subject of experiment.
Cut and guzle with butter and jam, whilst still warm !