Zone Squads Championships at Poole

We had an exciting days racing at the Zone Squads Champs todat in Poole Harbour racing against some of the top talent in the South of England. This is the beat upwind from the committee boat with the boys at the head of the pack for the second race (2402 on LHS). The excellent start marred by equipment failure, which left them having to retire. We have managed to get the boat repaired and are hoping to achieve some results tomorrow, but we have all had a action packed and exciting day. Well done guys!

  

Shaggy Dog Story

She's looking like this because it's Greg she's facing. I suspect she was thinking "....does he know what he's doing, why's he taking so long..?" Probably being a little more considerate that if it was me taking the photograph. She's just like that.

I don't recall her being particularly moody, it just looks that way!

Crossfire

Lewis and Miranda stealing a march up the headland towards Kimmeridge. I love images that carry the flavour of a particular trip, and this one does it for me. Wind, stormy seas and the kids bouncing along in their own self contained little word. This is how I see myself in my own childhood, tearing along the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, looking for mischief.

Autumn Closing In

Better get the camp fire lit then!

Just an excuse to load this picture of Greg on Exmoor, which I rather like.

Restronguet C Class Cats

Have to give  a plug to the C_Class Catamarans at Restronguet SC, some of whom we met when we were down a few weeks ago.

Best wishes to both Bastiaan Tentij of Team Hydros and Tom Phipps of Team Invictus, who gave loads of advice to Lewi and Greg...

Watch the latest action on this link (it's a live feed) all this week.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/the-world-s-most-advanced-sailing-catamarans

At one time I may have brushed it off as a moment of arty creative inspiration, but the truth is that I had my camera set to multiple exposure... Still it captures a moment in time, relative to an incident in Basingstoke hospital some years ago. The day started today with five in our bed, some cards and a few reminiscences. Lewi had fancied a day sailing, despite having won both the races yesterday at Calshot SC, so we indulged him. However there was no wind so they larked around on surfboards and ate cake.

Thanks to all for his greetings and presents, he had a really nice day.

The Ocean

She's like a ray of sunshine on a stormy day, and this was such a day. She bounced around happily cheering the boys and myself up with her fruitbat humour. This was as we marched across Corfe Common, and the black clouds rolled over.

I am listening to Josh Redman playing live at Nefertiti in 2012 - it's a track called The Ocean with Gregory Hutchinson and Reuben Rogers.

Three of a kind

It's fun when you discover aspects of your life with fresh eyes. Gregory's eyes in this case...

This is just above Kimmeridge's ledges, and I suspect had he known we were being watched Lewi may not have been so co-operative. Nice shot though Greg!

Coastal Retreat

One from our walk along the coast line yesterday with Corfe Castle the start point. It's a nice walk along the common and up the hill to Kingston before joining the sea at Hounstout. At this point the wind was very strong, and barely a person in sight which is unusual for a weekend. We walked to Kimmeridge stopping for a pasty on the ledges. There was one mad sailor on the sea, Lewis went so far as to suggest he was either inexperienced or mad - he was rather close to the shore in 40+knots onto a lee shore.

Later the winds got much stronger and it was a challenge standing up, but the brave battled on and notwithstanding the rain that set in; ...followed by very thick mist (!), we managed to get back safe by last light.

I shall post a few more pictures as Greg was busy with the camera too, and I have a nice selection. But in the meantime there's a nice picture of yours truly on my Flickr Stream

Crocodile Rock

She told me about her Maths work she'd being doing at school today, so we did some more crocodile equations before we said goodnight.

All eight she got right, before giving me one of her knowing smiles

I love her more than a whole box of frogs...

Chuff chuff

A trip down memory lane in more ways than one. We visited Pete and Chris, old friends from the Basingstoke Kite Club era who now live in Templecombe, and have a miniature train track running around the garden which Pete happily let the kids play with. Father Brown would love to have a play with these models as they are superb pieces of engineering, some even having real steam engines, which is hard to believe.

Miranda was especially interested in driving the trains, although she had a fair bit of difficulty getting her elbows in there!

Old dogs, new tricks!

This little snapshot captures a moment from a few weeks ago when oneday, hard at work I noticed a small dialogue box telling me that Julian and Gillian Brown had just logged onto Skype. Now this is not an everyday occurrence, so I immediately hit the connect button, thinking that they would fail to pick up (as per normal)

Well even more surprisingly it was Chris who answered and the mystery was solved. We had a good laugh and prove for once and all that Skype works perfectly well, but the fogeys cant get the hang of a telephone with a dialogue box!!

I had the foresight to do a screen grab, as I am trying to gather as many of these records as I can, and I am going to share it with you all.

I am listening to The Bad Plus - Suspicious Activity. There's a live version here "Lost of Love"  https://soundcloud.com/thebagmanman/the-bad-plus-lost-of-love-live

Back to school

 Miranda and I have been practising French which she has started doing in school. The trek into school was interspersed by various pleasantries to keep her focused!

The photo is one last effort to keep the summer hols alive....

Och Aye!

Perfect start to the day when some great photos arrive in my inbox! These are from our Cornwall trip, and in particular,  a record of our day spent with James, Sam, Beth, Eleanor and Rachel Riley.... We originally met on the campsite at Mylor in 2008 and managed to meet up for a day on the water paddling and sailing over to St Just.

We had a fun day splashing around, and Lewis was able to take Jim out for a sail on our boat which he enjoyed!

Photos taken by Sam

Cornwall

A few photos and memories from our trip down to Cornwall over the summer before the moment passes and we are back to school and normal everyday life

This was our sailing base at Mylor, the friendly Restronguet Sailing Club. We had a huge variety of location to explore from here and the boys were in their element. On our first day the weather was rather stormy but that was the rough weather pretty much done.

Above we couldn't resist a stop at the Rodda's Clotted Cream Factory during a cycle trip from coast to coast.

One day the boys sailed down to the Helford River and we met at Helford Passage with Nick and Helen Sinclair.

Greg's Birthday complete with birthday cake on the campsite!

Mipp made friends with a nice lad called Sam at St Levan, and they probably could have kept this up for a week had we not needed to get a move on!

Another day and another sailing location achieved. This was Portscatho on the Roseland peninsula which the boys sailed to from Mylor

Beach Bums

Back from our summer hols, and this is the first picture to get processed. This is Gwythian Beach overlooking St Ives in typically blustery weather. We had had a great day on the beach surfing and splashing through the waves, does life need to get any more complicated?

A nice walk aroiund the headland where we saw seals basking on the beach and Miranda inveted to concept of an imaginary seal friend called Sealy.

Today we mark the 85th birthday of the superb Horace Silver - watch this clip if you have the interest with Joe Henderson on Tenor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1CilMzT55M#t=1027