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The hull of a 40.1 being fitted out Chris called us a few days ago to announce yet another delay (2 weeks), due this time to a computer hack at Beneteau (which also hit Renault and other companies). Of course, he was not informed; clearly Beneteau's phone system must have gone down as well! He was also not informed that our " determination date " had been and gone and that Beneteau had already cut the timbers for the joinery. We had explored with Chris that we might defer the

Looks like launch date has been pushed back to early July 2021! That means we will be heading around the south of France in the peak and very busy summer season and the leisurely cruise eastwards will be much more time bound. We were chatting to Chris a couple of weeks ago about boat details and enquired about the delivery date from Beneteau, but when he looked on the system he realised the April date had been pushed back to " Week 23 ". We said that we were not happy with th

Schengen countries. One of the practical implications of Brexit is possible changes to travel within the EU: On January 1, 2021, UK citizens will probably continue to have visa-free travel within the EU countries, but only for 90 days within any 180 days (backward looking, rolling calculation: https://ec.europa.eu/assets/home/visa-calculator/calculator.htm?lang=en ). Interestingly, EU countries that are outside Schengen, e.g. Croatia, Cyprus, do not count towards this total

I had already spoken to North Sails on the south coast, but Chris also posed the question to his local rep Jim, in Scotland. This is what he replied: " Hi Chris, The G-Zero will be the easier sail to use but the G-1 will enable them to sail lower angles downwind, the G-Zero generally works well down to 140 true wind angle but the G-1 can go down to 160 TWA. The G-Zero would furl bottom up with the cable in the luff of the sail and operate in a similar way to a large genoa. T

Alix and I had a Grand Tour this week. We managed to get to Harlington to see my parents for the first time since lockdown, which was lovely. The weather was a bit suspect, so we ate the picnic that we had brought indoors. As Mum and Dad are still shielding a bit, and staying over is still too risky, Alix and I headed to the Yokshire Dales and had a pleasant overnight stay in the Royal Oak, Ripon. Next morning we had a beautiful drive across the north Pennines towards Cumbria