New friends !

Time seems to be racing by this season and summer has been somewhat elusive too making time on board special. Our daughter Charlotte has been in France working with Rockley watersports since the 9th June and apparently the weather's been great too....... thanks for that !

A couple of weeks ago I spent an hour under water cleaning off what can only be described at a coral reef from the bottom of the keel. At low water springs the keel sits about 30-40 cm in the soft mud on our berth and the growth of sealife was quite surprising. Studland bay is the perfect location to do this as the water is a clear enough and calm, until the jet skis and water skiers turn up !

We finally decided on which company would change the standing rigging, and on Monday 19th September Silhouette's mast comes down and "Quay Rigging" start work. Although the job will only take a week we can't re-step for 2 weeks as we have to wait for the next full spring tide. When it's done we'll post before during and after photos and details including costings.

As mentioned before, we had made contact with Steve & Helen who own "Allegrini" another 473 and arranged to meet up during the summer. Last weekend we finally managed it in Yarmouth. Our trip up on Saturday morning was in poor visibility with sea mist and fog all the way but the sun finally made an appearance as we reached Hurst castle.

A first for us, and quite exciting to be meeting fellow cruisers who would be leaving the UK when we do and following similar routes as far as Gibraltar at least. What a great couple they are, good company, funny and knowledgeable. I mentioned I couldn't get the AIS to show up on the cockpit repeater so Steve said "I can fix that"....... after many visits to both stations i swear if I'd offered him a hammer he would've used it. Suddenly it started working, well done Steve. On the sail back to Poole both e80 and e120 showed the AIS to be off again but on checking marine traffic our entire track was there !?! The last software update for these units was July 2012 which we have so I shall do the same thing Steve did next weekend..... I'll keep the hammer handy!

We had spoken about having a completely independent chartplotter in case anything happened to the Raymarine units i.e. lightening strike or power failure, Steve said "you need a bad elf".....

Sounded like a dodgy character in a pantomime to me but sure enough it does exist.

Designed for Apple Ipads etc it's a gps system which simply plugs into the lightening connector and once it's configured to the Ipad, and you download your choice of chartplotter software, job done. We ordered one this week and as we already have Raymarine we added the navionics app and I must say it works all for £110.00

Thankyou Steve that's yet another pint we owe you