Dairne and I had been sailing for more than 50 years. For 20 years we had sailed a Rustler 36 called Ariadne, having owned her from new. She was built in 1995. Our cruising area was between Orkney and the Gironde, Brittany and Ireland, and we covered about 36,000 miles in total.
We also helped our elder son acquire a 40ft cutter in New Zealand, a beautiful sailing country. Latterly we had made a couple of expeditions that we would be unable to achieve sailing our own boat – to Norway; and to Cape Horn.
Our earlier experience had been in Fay-A,a 30ft wooden sloop that we owned for 20 years. Before that we had both sailed dinghies, a tradition being continued by our younger son who sails a 505.
In early 2012, Dairne had a stroke. We continued to try to sail for a few years, but it became impossible for Dairne to cope with angle of heel, and beating to windward. Reluctantly we decided to switch to a motor boat and bought Teal, a 2002 built Hardy 36 Commodore. Teal is our New Beginning.
Ariadne was sold to Susie Goodall. After a testing Atlantic Triangle, Susie entered the boat, renamed DHL Starlight, in the 2018/9 Golden Globe Race. The race tried to emulate conditions of the first Golden Globe 50 years earlier – no GPS or satellite phones, boats designed before 1980, sextant and paper charts. 18 boats started in July 2018. Susie was unluckily caught in a flat spot, and by Cape of Good Hope was lying 8th out of the 10 boats still running by then. The first 5 boats were all Rustler 36. 2 boats were wrecked by gales, and even the 1st and second boats survived being rolled or pitchpoled. Susie had moved up to 4th place and , in the South Pacific, was making ground on the boat ahead when she, too, was pitchpoled somne 2500 miles west of Chile.and lost her entire rig. The only concession to modern kit was an epirb and an emergency satellite phone. By excellent seamanship, a Chinese freighter diverted several hundred miles, and Susie managed to manoeuvre under one of her cranes. How she got off DHL Starlight onto the crane hook in 4 metre swells is a story we are still waiting to hear. The boat was abandoned and has probably sunk. A sad, but brave end.
On this website, we will cover our adventures in Teal, and record our sailing history. There is also a section recording our major non-sailing expeditions. In the Legacy section I aim to pass on some of our hard won sailing and environmental experience – we know where the potholes are as we have been in most of them.
Much of my photo processing has been done using Serif products, and most recently using Serif Affinity which (in my view) is challenging the Adobe product range in many areas, so I have added some comment on this in the Media section.
Weather pervades all outdoor activity, especially sailing. In the weather section I have accumulated the sources of weather information that I find most helpful.