Recent content by Sonnamara

The event was the World Arc. The boat was Asolare, an Amel 54.

I have been using Aloe Up for the last couple of years and find it excellent - its not cheap but dries quickly and is non-greasy. I have used P20 but found it stained my clothes.

My father used to have a finesse 27 - when we purchased her she was just a plain bermudan sloop, with very tired old sails and unbelievably bad weather helm - in our second season we added a bowsprit and converted to cutter rig with new head sails - the transformation was incredible, completely...

I wear almost the same clothing for winter sailing as I do for skiing. The same base layers and fleece mid layers, but foul weather gear as a shell layer (Musto offshore mpx) - a good pair of gloves are essential and good headwear - my best purchase last year was a musto fleece hat with russian...

Does anyone else find this picture on the Jeanneau site frightening or am I missing something? Jeanneau Website

I can see no problem in handling a Dufour 44 shorthanded, my wife and I regularly sail our Bene 47 with just the two of us, with a good autopilot and appropriately sized self tailing winches we've never had a problem - don't have a spinnaker yet, but I can't really imagine that being a problem...

I find O2 coverage to be quite good almost the whole way across the bay the only patchy area being about 6 miles west of Portland Bill.

Thats funny - we had a racing pigeon land on board our boat whilst crossing Lyme Bay from Dartmouth on Friday afternoon too - he had the same id tags on his legs as yours - same one?? Ours stayed on board for about 2 hours before flying off to the south west at about 7pm. He seemed to quite...

We've been visited by what looks like same the big dolphin every time I've been through the Looe channel this year - last time I came through he was accompanied by another 2 smaller dolphins too. Last Friday we were approached by a pod of about 5 or 6 bottlenose dolphins half way across Lyme...

They are small brackets that fit to a swim platform or scoop and by fixing pads with hooks onto your inflatable allow you to store a dinghy across your transform - we inherited them on our current boat and find them very useful if not a little ugly.

yeah you're probably right - but it makes good reading.

Unfortunately this will be skewed in favour of people who know what screen resolution is and/or care! Globally 67% of people using the internet are on 1024 x 768 or higher. My firm still usually designs sites for 800 x 600, but we have recently built a site optimised for broadband users at a...

All the main navigational tips seem to have been covered above - but watch out for Lobster Pots through the Looe Channel - we came across pots with about 10 - 20 foot of floating line at low tide (actually with floats attached to the top part of the line!) about 2 weeks ago. Also as you enter...

If you're based in or around London I can recommend Capital Sailing - I have found them excellent in the past. They run a lot of course dates, so often have last minute availability. They have a website here: Capital Sailing. I'm not affiliated with them in any way other than as a happy customer.

I guess that although unsinkable its not fireproof! - we had a small fire on our last boat rounding North Foreland on a cold November night, thankfully the second extinguisher put it out - I'd definitely still want to carry a life raft for offshore or at the least a good dinghy ready to use...