My current yacht – Wildwood is a Young 88. She was built in 1985 and is one of about 140 boats made in this design. Wildwood is one of about five wooden boats that were built and the rest are made in fibreglass. Here is a bit of history about the Young 88 I have…
That is the question! We we had a great sail last night on the first race of the Oborns Nautical Twilight Series. The evening started with a light southerly which died away to nothing as we crossed the line sideways with the incoming tide. Then a lovely light Easterly filled in and we confidently set,…
What is a Great Circle I hear you ask!? Well I didn’t know much about them either UNTIL NOW! So if you are excited to learn new things about circles and sailing, then please dear reader – carry on and be enlightened! A Great Circle is a circle whose plain intersects with the centre of…
The Ocean Yachtmaster syllabus requires that you know a few things about compasses – how they work and how to use one. The Earth’s Magnetic Field Imagine that inside the earth is a powerful bar magnet. This lies with its blue end toward North and its red end towards South. It’s axis is not exactly…
The forecast was for rain and Southerlies, but the day dawned bright and sunny and thankfully the weather forecasters had it wrong and it stayed lovely all day! The kids all unfortunately deserted us, and so after a mad dash around town delivering them to their various other activities, I headed over to the club,…
Feeling very excited about being nominated for another blogging award! Thanks so much to Fabio from La possibilita di un’isola for the nomination. Fabio and his wife Kate and their cat live on their yacht Tranquility (Love the name!) Head over and check out his blog! So the Leibster award is passed from blogger to blogger –…
I have recently completed the Coastguard Boating Education GPS Operator course. ** Warning ** this is a long wordy post – mainly for my own benefit of storing my study notes online – so read on if you are interested in learning more about GPS – but if you are looking for gossip and photos…
Tonight I am starting a Celestial Navigation Course at Naval Point Club Lyttelton. I am a bit apprehensive as I don’t enjoy working with numbers and calculations, so we shall see how we go! I am planning on taking notes and writing them up here on my blog so that I can refer back to…
About 15 years ago I started crewing on a yacht called Natural Magic. My Mum had a friend and his flatmate Craig crewed on this yacht. Mum mentioned to him that I was interested in sailing, and he suggested I come and crew on the yacht he sailed on. So I turned up to the…
We had a flare demonstration at the yacht club tonight which was an interesting experience! The cruising commodore – David and myself got permission from Maritime New Zealand to hold the event and we also had to inform Airways/Air Traffic, the Police, the Harbour Master, the Port, Coastguard and the Fire Brigade. Then we contacted…
Astrolabe Sailing 