For my Valentine

Today I'm in London and Sam is in Suffolk, which makes it hard secretly to sneak a handmade card or a box of heart-shaped chocolates on to the breakfast table. 

So instead I'm posting to the blog to tell you all what a wonderful husband I have. 

When we sail, I get jittery. Even in the super safe and sheltered Baltic there is always something for me to worry about. On every journey, Sam looks after me, reassures me and makes it all happen. When things get tough, he makes the decisions. He even tells me I'm beautiful and encourages me to sail with no clothes on. I couldn't go sailing without him, however many clothes I was wearing. 

Thank you my love for putting up with me for all these years, and here's to many more...

Presentation skills

Last night we gave a talk to Haven Ports Yacht Club about our adventures so far in the Baltic, entitled To the Baltic with Ben (thank you Griff Rhys Jones). Despite icy weather there was a really excellent turn-out and some very kind comments afterwards. We still feel a bit fraudulent, especially when Richard from Brave said his idea of Baltic sailing was to head up the west coast of Norway and across to Shetland - a stretch of water which is more the stuff of nightmares than dreams for us.

For those who are interested, the presentations are available on SlideShare in PDF format. As ever, we had so many photos and so much to say that the presentation just grew and grew.

Technical footnote: For various reasons we showed the slideshow from PowerPoint running on Windows on Camilla's MacBook. This was all absolutely fine up to the point where we finished the technical rehearsal and closed the lid of the laptop. Two systems trying to sleep at once was obviously too much of a challenge, and as 8pm rolled around we had a few worried moments when the projector would only display the Apple galaxy image. Huge thanks to the audience member who swiped the MacBook touchpad to find us the correct view.