It is unbelievable that we are already in the middle of April and there hasn’t been a single good day for sailing! Normally we would have had a few, potentially chilly, eeekends by now. I remember from when I played a lot of cricket you would always get some unseasonal warm days early in the […]
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Mariadz had the same cockpit cushions for seventeen years and if we are honest they were a little “tired” and not as comfortable as they could be. We knew before we left on our big trip we would need to sort these out and Maria has also been keen to remove any semblance of the […]
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Maria likes a good sing song and will often be heard belting out Whitney as well as forcing me to sing to Islands in the Stream with my own “Dolly”. Sometimes she is brilliant and other times not quite at the top of her game. In the early days of our relationship, I probably didn’t […]
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We’re in the middle of the hardest winter since we moved onto the boat and now we have been hit by the Beast from the East. Now I have to say that my first thought on this was that it was a woman that we met in a Colchester night club, that I needed Maria […]
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As always with a boat, there were a few niggly things that we need to get done before the start of the season. The first of these is the throttle on Mariadz. This is located on the steering binnacle next to the forward facing radar control but Maria has always struggled when the engine is […]
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We were just about to go on holiday at the end of January when we suddenly started to have issues with the shore power. It seemed like there was a loose connection somewhere and so we had to trace it back from the pontoon power supply. It became clear that there was an overheating problem […]
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Mariadz has a spacious saloon with a large table meant for many people to eat and socialise around. And Maria and I have done our fair share of that! I expect that will also happen a lot when we go on our travels, if the opinion of John Rodriguez (the yacht broker and round-the-worlder) is […]
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When we bought Mariadz, she had a mattress in the aft stateroom that was good quality but had seen better days. It did not fit the platform well and the two halves of the mattress separated during the night leaving a moat to catch the unwary “traveller” in the morning. Clearly, this was more of a […]
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Some people laugh at the fact that we take our cats skiing. But the cats love it! They chill on the motor home while we are out and then go out for a walk in the snow for a while when we return. The small space in the van means they are always close and […]
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Having bought a very nice walker bay rib a few years ago, we had noticed that it was getting dirty and damaged by being exposed to the elements. This will only get worse when we are full time sailing. The solar panels provide some kind of shelter like a car-port but to protect it properly […]
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