The Facelift

This is the sea dawg looking rather sorry for herself on Tuesday evening after the op to fix her eyes. She was a bit groggy when this was taken, but the surgeon's done a very neat job on her and she was back to her old self the next day.

Bless her little spotty chest.

Balmy Summer days

Chichester Harbour entrance 12th July 2008. Yep, that's a tornado over Selsey. Well, not quite. It's a funnel cloud coming down from an apocalyptic looking cloud line. We didn't see it touch down, but apparently Selsey is England's little tornado alley.

We were going to try and head over to Cowes, despite the fairly ropey weather, because we'd got James on board for the first time. We knew the tides would be against us, with high tide at 7:00am, but the wind was against us too. After three hours of pitifully slow progress against wind and tide, we were still only level with the Langstone Harbour. We could have pressed on and got to Cowes at about 7pm, but we decided that Chichester was still closer, and so we turned around and had a very pleasant sail back. With wind and tide favouring us, the GPS was showing a healthy 7 knots at times, which was nice.

The weather was still pretty indifferent though. We were hoping not to be in fleeces in the middle of July! Ah well, the food at the Ship was particularly fab.


We did manage a short sail and picnic in the harbour on Sunday. With no particular place to go and two crew to pull on the sheets, we spent some time tacking up the channel from Itchenor to East Head. Despite much moaning from the crew about tacking every couple of minutes, I thought it was quite fun. Of course I wasn't doing any work.

As the level of mutinous grumblings started to build up, I decided discretion was the better part of valour and headed up Thorney Channel to find a buoy to hang off while we had a little light lunch. Missy seemed much chirpier after a couple of glasses of pink wine, although she did refuse to do the first mate duties on the way back to base.

Burgau, Portugal

With school out in the US for the summer, Missy's mum came over for her annual visit. Last year she sat watching the rain for pretty much the whole trip, so this year we took the precaution of booking a week in Portugal to try and guarantee a little sunshine.

The chosen spot was Burgau, a small village in the Western Algarve just to the west of Praia da Luz. It's still relatively small and unspoiled, with the new complex where we stayed being one of the larger developments, but still not too intrusive.

We had a pleasant week over there, flying out on Saturday afternoon with BA to Faro and hiring a slightly scuffed up, but servicable Peugeot 307 estate from ZitAuto at Faro airport who seem to come highly recommended.

We didn't do much for the week but eat fish, read books, lie around in the sun. We had planned to do more, but that seemed just about sufficient to be honest. Most of the restaurants in Burgau specialise in fish and we had some great stuff.

A word of warning: if you go to the restaurant Ancora and order the crab salad starter, then it's probably best to share! It's quite an edifice.









On the other hand, there's plenty of simpler stuff at the cafes and you can't go to Portugal without having a few sardines. These were at the cafe at Ingrina, a few miles to the west of Burgau in the National Park. The food was good and the view's pretty special, too.










I did spend some time staring wistfully out to sea and we did have some ideas of hiring a hobie cat from the beach at Luz, or doing a trip on one of the larger sailing boats, but you can only sail the cats in a small area off the beach and the trips just looked too much hassle, so the only places we had to see were Sagres and Cape St Vincent.


Cape St Vincent is is the most south westerly part of Europe. I'm not fond of heights at the best of times so, while I appreciated the rugged beauty of the Cape St Vincent cliffs, it took a while for my stomach to stop churning.

All in all a very pleasant week, with lots of good food and good weather in lovely surroundings. Highly recommended.

There are some more pics of the week over here