The week between Christmas and New Year is a strange time.  You don’t know whether you should be still over-indulging in food and drink and wrestling with the unfinished jigsaw (fiendish - lots of boats in a marina) or whether you should be back on the green tea and perched at the drawing board by 8am every day.  In our house we have a gentle kind of compromise - work head back on, lists of things to do being made, but still enjoying the festive goodies, which is why I am writing about pirates’ ultimate punishment - marooning - whilst enjoying a large glass of white wine and dipping into the dwindling supply of chocolates.  When they’re gone, they’re gone….

A great healthy tonic to boost the immune system and compensate for the onslaught of chocolate - carrot and apple juice, with a chunk of root ginger and lump of betroot.  Sounds awful, tastes fantastic!  I think my juicer is about to expire; it starts off happily enough as I shove in the carrots and chopped apples, but halfway through it starts to vibrate and make alarming noises.  I need to wrestle with it to stop it leaping off the edge of the worktop and by the time it’s done, the kitchen is spattered with vegetable pulp.  Two minutes to drink the juice, ten minutes to clean the juicer and kitchen.  That’s life!

Right, so how many of you have discovered the deliberate mistake in the write up about my 2009 year planner? Only one person so far, unless everyone else is just being too polite to point out that there aren’t “wider columns in the summer months for all your sailing plans”. Yes, all the columns are in fact the same size. Well spotted! I started off with the same layout as 2008, worked out the design then found there was space to widen the winter columns, so they ended up the same as the summer. So that’s what happened (are you still awake? Do keep up…..)

Meanwhile, still eating plenty of Christmas chocolate (need to finish it off quickly to get temptation out of the way) and researching more sea stories, currently fascinated by the wreck of a Spanish galleon in 1641.

Happy new year!

On the drawing board at the moment is painting of Francis Drake’s Golden Hind and the beginnings of a map of the world showing Drake’s round the world mission as official pirate and Spanish loot-stealer. This is where I need some help from younger readers; I’ve started to write (and draw) a book about true adventures of the sea. The title will possibly be Tall Tales for Short Sailors or maybe Bunkside Book (what do you think?). It will be for sailors and non sailors, anyone who finds the sea an exciting place!

Stories so far include ancient explorers, ghost pilots, abandoned ships, shipwrecks, pirates, buried treasure, bumbling admirals, sea monsters and a few more modern adventures including racing yachts, dismastings and storms. If anyone knows of any stories that would be good to put in, let me know (as long as they’re true!). Travelling across oceans is a lot safer now than it was in the early days of explorers, but it’s still a place for mysteries and adventures……

It’s giving me a lovely excuse to do plenty of research (another world for curling up by the fire with a cat, a glass of wine and reading books about storms, shipwrecks and other wet stuff!)