We like having redundancy and spares on board Mariadz. One of our fallback navigation and anchor watch options is the iPad but these are power hungry apps which will run down the batteries quite fast. So, in true Mariadz style, this has led us to get a charge capability in the cockpit which will work […]
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For the August bank holiday last year, we visited Osea Island, location of the retreat that Amy Winehouse visited for rehab. This has since closed down but the island is very nice and in good weather feels like it could be in the Mediterranean or Caribbean. So with a sunny bank holiday expected, we decided […]
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Dahling, one can’t have a sundowner without ice! And so it began. The hunt for a portable ice maker that could make ice quickly and didn’t use much power. Our cruising friends have always said that ice is very unusual on cruising boats and potentially a commodity. I can see the ice maker being on […]
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We had a lot of electrical work done a few years ago and as part of this we had some extra 240v sockets added in useful places with usb sockets included. The vast amount of devices that are now chargeable by usb seemed to make this a sensible change. Unfortunately this year one of the […]
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When we bought Mariadz, the anchor windlass had only just been replaced and we laughingly have suggested that this was the only thing that actually worked properly when we got her. So it was with some dismay, that on our first weekend of the 2018 season, we tried to deploy the anchor and got nothing. […]
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Those that are familiar with our journey will know that music is important to us. One of the first things we did when we got both of our boats was install new stereo systems with Bluetooth, to access music on phones, and a remote control to allow us to control the stereo from anywhere on […]
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So on the back of our first weekend, the weather held on and we decided that another jaunt down river would be the perfect way to recover from a hard week of work. Maria was working from home on the Friday and was able to get the boat prepped and I finished early so that […]
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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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