About me (Camilla)

 I've changed the theme for the blog (June 2024) and it seems there is nothing which explains who I am. I'm hoping this post can be hidden in the archives so that it only appears if you click the link.

I'm Camilla Herrmann and I have been writing this blog since 2006 when Sam and I took both our sons, Guy (born 1990) and Ben (born 1993) and sailed away towards the Med. All of our posts since then are still on here. By training I'm a journalist, initially in local newspapers and then in motoring magazines. After a period when the boys were small and I was a not very successful freelance, I went into internal and corporate communications, mostly for Norwich Union and then Aviva. Fortuitously in 2005, just before our big trip, I was made redundant and ever since then have done contract work. Since 2015 I have edited the quarterly magazine Cruising for the Cruising Association, of which I am also a member.

In 1986 when Sam and I moved in together, the first thing we bought was a cafetière, and the second was a Miracle dinghy. We sailed initially on the Medway, where we went aground several times, and then when we moved to Suffolk in various other locations. For a while from around 1992 we had a Winkle Brig, a lovely little gaff-rigged trailer sailer, which we sailed on the Broads and in the Netherlands. A few years later we started doing flotilla holidays and in 2003 we bought a Sadler 29, Magewind, which took us out to sea and across the North Sea for the first time in 2004. She was lovely but not quite big enough, and in 2005 we bought Kalessin whose adventures you can read on this blog. We sailed her down to Portugal in 2006, into the Med in 2007, and back through the French canals in 2008. In 2011 we took her to the Baltic.

Over the years I got the various RYA theory qualifications, plus coastal skipper in 2004 (I think). In 2015 I passed the Yachtmaster practical.

On 17 May, 2012 Sam suffered a massive stroke which resulted in right-side weakness, no use of his right arm and badly affected language. I thought we would have to sell the boat, but with the help of Rob who spent an afternoon lifting Sam on and off his Westerly Storm in Chichester Harbour, and both Guy and Ben, we were able to return to Kalessin in Denmark and start sailing again. Of course it meant that I was skipper and over the years I have taken on more responsibility, but we have almost always been supported by crew. Sailing with Sam was hard physical work, as he needed a lot of help around the boat, and hard mental work because he always thought he could do stuff better than me, but couldn't explain how. But it was what we did and we managed to get the boat down to southern Brittany for a couple of seasons, over to northern France and the Netherlands in other years, and enjoy our own east coast.

On 6 September, 2023, Sam died from an inoperable brain bleed following a fall. As I sat beside his hospital bed in the six days before he died, I decided I would sail Kalessin around (most of) Britain during 2024. Then I would decide what to do with her.