Monthly Archives: December 2010

“You start out with luck and no experience and hope to get the experience before the luck runs out”  –  popular sailing proverb

With first year drawing to a close, I felt its time for a little summary of the journey to date. And yes, since everybody from the Arabs to the Catholics have come to enjoy their own calendar, this year shall henceforth be known as year 0 of the age of the Republic.<br/ >

Journey facts:

Months lived aboard: 9
Distance covered: 265 nm
Countries: 3
Ports: 5
Crew members: 5
Uniforms on board: 4
Incidents of sea sickness: 2
Worst hangover: Blankenberge
Best party: Brighton
Belgian waffles consumed: Lots and lots!

Engine failures: 2
MOBs: 0
Max wind: 6 bf
Min wind: 0 bf (duh!)

 

This photo was taken from Cherbourg castle when MS Queen Elizabeth visited Cherbourg the other day – monster is just visible in the Port de Plaisance below.

We’ve had a rather soft landing in Cherbourg; the winter rates are comparatively affordable, and […]

“Ich glaube, jeder Mensch lebt sein eigenes Leben und stirbt seinen eigenen Tod, das glaub’ ich.”  –  Jens Peter Jacobsen
I was once again rewarded by an oddly satisfying sense of achievement for having made it to Cherbourg. I guess all that responsibility-bearing stress on what is after all a fairly insane mission culminates in this sense of “it may have been absurd, but at least we survived to tell the tale”.

Perhaps a bit like the people who partook in and survived that other famous amphibious invasion.. Ok, ok, we weren’t greeted by Nazi armies, but do note the Allies did their landing in mid-summer!

Having arrived in the morning, we slept all day Friday, went out for a few lagers at night, and decided to set off for Guernsey at 0300 Sunday, aiming for Brest or Saint-Malo as an end to my tour with Gebard.

It was still internationally freezing, and I had heard that England was enjoying it’s annual stint […]

 

I spent two long weeks on the guest pontoon at Brighton marina, which is famously known to be a bit of an overpriced dump. Around it, there are “a large Asda supermarket and two groups of boutique shops, restaurants and bars, plus a hotel, a bowling alley, a health club, a casino, and a multiplex cinema with a multi-storey car-park built over and around it”, plus “several gated communities consisting of townhouses and apartments” (thanks wikipedia!). The long and short of it being, I was suddenly living in the middle of some type of mall environment, a constant reminder of the late capitalist quagmire Bill Hicks referred to as the “Third Mall from the Sun”.

In spite of the lack of organic community, I set out using my tried and tested participative anthropology method, joined the local “david lloyd” gym on a trial, ate asda chickens every day, and sampled all the real ales that were on offer at […]