Guy is a Yachtmaster

Please give me a job

Hooray! Our son is now better qualified than we are. He is a Yachtmaster with commercial endorsement, courtesy of Flying Fish. He has covered more than 8,000 miles at sea, many of them in weather where we would hesitate about leaving the harbour! (Some were with us though). He is a pleasure to have on board.

If anyone would like to offer him a job, please put a comment on this post and we'll come back to you within minutes....

We're famous (slightly)

Quick, rush out and buy a copy of December's edition of Yachting Monthly - Kalessin is on the cover, with a four-page, 100-point test inside where she scored an impressive 86%.

We went out for a morning in September with Dick Durham and photographer Lester McCarthy. Originally they planned to do a comparative three-boat test but getting the three boats in the same place at the same time proved a logistical challenge, so they decided to do the Storm on its own.

It was a gusty day and we had an embarrassing moment getting out of the berth when the feathering prop did its thing of refusing to drive us forward. Other than that Kalessin performed extremely well and we were proud of her.

It was also a pleasure to have Guy on board with us. At that time he was not quite a Yachtmaster - now he is - see separate post. But short tacking up the river is really good fun with a keen, agile young crew member on board. And he knows what to do without being told! It's brilliant.

It was a Thursday, so SYH was pretty quiet, but on our return to the berth a few people saw us coming in and also obviously observed that our crew looked uncommonly like Dick Durham. Word clearly got about, because a couple of days later at the Southampton Boat Show we were chatting to the electronics sales chap from Seamark Nunn and he said "what's this I hear about you being in some kind of boat test?"

Note: the images and PDF attached are from a draft version of the feature - it may be slightly different from the final version.

Merry Christmas from just me

Video of photos made for Sam's funeral    Dear friends and family As I hope you all know, this year has been a difficult one for me. On ...