Recent Randomness

The last few weeks have been manic. I have been out on the solent helping out a friend of mine to finish the filming for a set of instruction videos to help people with basic sailing techniques.
During this time my sister has been refurbishing the kitchen, painting walls and doing all the other stuff that has been put off since we moved in.
One of these large tasks required re sealing between the floor boards:

I was out helping Pip on Wednesday and Friday and had been asked to sail in the all girls team for the Womens Open Keelboat Championships on the Saturday and the Sunday. This is an unusual event but is good fun and after the brilliant result last weekend in the IRC Championships we were lent the boat to see if we could get the trophy for this championships too.
Unfortunately we had a slightly unpredictable day on the Saturday because the winds were very changeable but a good strong day on the Sunday enabled us to log a second in our class which also converted to a second overall in the event.

Pip was the skipper for this event and did a sterling job of keeping us all in our place and not letting any of the very necessary command structure break down. Her account of the weekend is on her blog here.

When I returned from three days of sailing there was some nice suprises in the garden, one of the courgettes was nearly ripe and the plums on the trees that over hang the back of our garden had started to ripen. Together with some of the ripe strawberries these made some nice pickings:

I hope you all have had a nice but slightly less hectic few weeks than I have had...

Busy weekends

For most of us the weekends are the times that we can get out into the garden and sort out all those things that have been put off from last weekend. 

For me this is not quite the story at the moment, the garden has been put slightly onto the back burner as we are trying to get the kitchen redecorated before my sister returns back to the parents house. 

On top of that I have been in Cowes for a sailing event from Thursday evening through to Sunday evening in some of the windiest weather I have ever sailing in.

I would like to take this chance to say well done and thank you to everyone who sails on Elaine for a wonderful weekend and a brilliant time sailing. Also well done for winning our first ever IRC nationals. 

Here is a photo taken by Paul Wyeth jsut after we crossed the finish line and knew that we had managed to win the event:

I am off to try and get the windows painted before this evening as the parents are turning up for dinner and I am off sailing again tomorrow to help a friend out with a training session she is doing. 

xxx

Sleeping Patterns

Currently My sleeping patterns are very messed up.

I had to get up at 3:30 am on saturday morning to go sailing as I was taking part in the Round the Island Race.

This was good fun but very windy...

We missed out on our target time of 7 hours by 10 seconds which was very frustrating but we recieved our best overall result ever which has almost made up for it. We were ranked 59th overall last time it was checked :D

Unfortunately this messed up my sleeping patterns as I flopped into bed shortly after returning at about 4pm... I will have to sort these out before Tuesday when I start working for a bit... Fingers crossed Im not still semi nocturnal by then :P

PS yes I do have the panda eyes to show I was out on the water for about 8 hours!