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Script. Naming Ceremony 22.07.2021 Sari and Thorne arrived at the quay at about 10:30. (We had driven the yacht back from the marina to try and gather more equipment.) We were soon preparing for our naming ceremony. They had brought some flowers from the local road verges, an olive branch and Champagne. Alix had done a lot of research into the naming ceremony and here are her explanatory notes: 1. The naming of a boat in the UK traditionally uses the phrase “God bless this bo

Picture of a Rascasse, on the wall of a local restaurant in Port Leucat. I have been thinking about fish a lot. Alix and I do like to eat fish, and not just on Fridays. I suppose that when you are about to sail across the sea that has been most-heavily exploited for the longest period of time, it’s not an irrelevant subject to dwell on. At Port-La-Nouvelle yesterday, one of the half-dozen or so day trawlers had landed its catch, some of which was being sold from wooden shack

“ Today was gonna be the day, we were gonna throw the ropes to you .” OK, poetic licence, it was supposed to be Yesterday. Yesterday was supposed to be our test sail, with technical handover the day before. That was Plan A, but we have had so many plan variants, that we are now past Plan Z and onto Plan AA (for any Excel geeks). The latest is that we can get on board on ( Ruby) Tuesday and then Sail Away * on Wednesday, down to Barcelona . The wind should have dropped a lit

Missy Bear on the quay at Canet-en-Roussillon. Thorne has just noted that Missy Bear is now transmitting her position! So SAS must have set up the VHF/AIS transceiver and switched it on as they are on-board. You can now track our position, if you so wish, by going to https://www.marinetraffic.com/en/ais/home and searching for 'Missy Bear'. For the technology nerds, AIS (Automatic Identification System) is an automatic tracking system often used by the authorities to monitor

Tracks of the Tramontane and its neighbour the Mistral. Apart from the recent fad of naming Atlantic storms, I’m unaware that we Brits name specific winds that blow across our islands. In the Mediterranean, however, specific winds have been named since ancient times. We are now experiencing one of those first hand; the Tramontane. And it is going to blow hard for about five days, so even if Missy Bear was ready, we might be staying in the ‘Bar du Port’. If you are not a weath