Should we be buying a battleship instead of a Bavaria?

I recently read of a man who sailed around the world with his family. He had his yacht designed and built specifically for his voyage. It was made of steel to help the chances of it surviving a collision with a steel container that might be floating just beneath the surface of the water. Also he carried a firearm aboard, to use against any pirates that might attempt to board his vessel. Reading about this made me think about whether we were buying the right boat; should we be buying our own battleship instead?

Now our voyage around GB won't quite be the same as a circumnavigation of the world, but all the same.....there may just be some sneaky steel container lurking just below the water surface and exactly in our path. This thought has exercised our minds on several previous occasions during cross-channel passages, especially at night. I do hope we don't have to find out how we would cope!

......and we don't get many pirates around the UK fortunately, so hopefully we won't need any firearms aboard. If any undesirables present themselves, hopefully there will be other effective ways of dealing with them.

We'll just have to hope our luck continues to hold out!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to anyone who happens to be reading this blog! Tradition has it that sailing boats mount a Christmas tree at the top of the mast, like in the image below. Somehow I suspect we won't bother with that on Blue Star, not that we are against tradition - its just that we are likely to be in our own warm homes rather than aboard Blue Star during Christmas.

Talking of Blue Star, you may have noticed that we now have a website for Blue Star itself! Just click on the Blue Star logo and you will be taken to it! www.thebluestar.co.uk

I hope you enjoy your Christmas!

Traditional location of a Christmas tree on board a sailing boat

Our new logo!

........so I met with Gary and Greg from Verso Creative, the people who work for Woolcool on their marketing strategy. They came up with our brilliant new logo for our yacht and for our Round Great Britain Challenge which we are really pleased with - you can see it on the right of this blog, and below too. Don't you think it's great!? If anyone wants any help with marketing work I can't recommend them highly enough. Well done Verso Creative!

History on our doorstep

One of the things I like about coastal cruising is visiting places of historic interest. On our recent trip from Southampton to London we ventured up the river Medway where the wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery lies, complete with 1500 tons of explosive. One of the reasons the explosive has never been removed is that there is a chance it could ignite spontaneously - in an earlier similar situation whilst attempting to remove explosive from a ship off Folkestone the ordnance exploded with such force as to cause shock waves equivalent to 4.5 on the Richter scale! One estimate suggests that if the SS Richard Montgomery exploded it would cause a 300m width of water to be thrown 3km (!!!!) into the air, and the blast would shatter nearly every window in Sheerness! The ship itself is just visible above the water (see below), and an exclusion zone is marked by several buoys which mark the wreck. Fascinating!

The wreck of the SS Richard Montgomery

Its not really like this.....

A woman was having a medical problem - her husband was snoring very loudly and every night ! So she called the doctor one morning, and asked him if there was anything he could do to relieve her "suffering."
"Well, there is one operation I can perform that will cure your husband" said the doctor, "but it is really rather expensive. It will cost you £10,000 down, and payments of £1000 for 36 months, plus payments for extras of course.
"My goodness!" the woman exclaimed, "that sounds like I'm buying a yacht!"
"Humm," the doctor murmured, "too obvious, huh?"

I found the above joke on 'tinterweb'. I thought this one was amusing too:

 A young wife, her boorish husband and a young good-looking sailor were shipwrecked on an island.

One morning, the sailor climbed a tall coconut tree and yelled, "Stop making love down there!"
"What's the matter with you?" the husband said when the sailor climbed down. '"We weren't making love."
"Sorry," said the sailor, "From up there it looked like you were."
Every morning thereafter, the sailor scaled the same tree and yelled the same thing. Finally the husband decided to climb the tree and see for himself.
With great difficulty, he made his way to the top.
The husband says to himself, "By golly he's right! It DOES look like they're making love down there!"

We will of course need a good supply of jokes to keep the crew amused during our circumnavigation of GB. I rather like the one about the crab walking into the bar and demanding a drink......but you'll have to ask me about that one as it requires some hand action to fully appreciate it!

Which are your favourite sailing jokes?

All quiet on the boat-buying front.....

There seems to be a temporary hiatus in the boat-buying process. We are waiting to be assigned a date when the boat will be sailed to mainland Britain, which will also be our opportunity to have our test sail in her. She will be sailed to Swanwick on the Hamble, where she will then be inspected by a surveyor before we complete the purchase, probably by 1 Feb now. That will give us about 3 months to get any updates/improvements etc. made to the boat before a planned launch in early May. There will then be some 'shake down' cruises to check that everything performs as it should, before we embark on our circumnavigation of GB!