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Ruby Tuesday on the Algarve.
Hello and welcome to visitors to our website.
This is the cruising website of Barry and
Janet and covers our liveaboard travels from 2003 when we both retired and moved
aboard our sailing yacht. You can read of travels aboard the yachts Mithril
and Ruby Tuesday together with facts, pictures and observations of
the people and places on our route. We've also got a few totally factual pages relating
to us, the boat and technical topics relevant to cruising sailors and would-be cruising
sailors. The buttons above give quick access to the named pages and a
site map is also available and might help a first time visitor. Also
note, if a picture has a wide blue edge then click it to see an enlargement.
We hope you enjoy your visit here, and if you do, or find it useful, then please
sign our
Guest Book. Why not sign it anyway, then we can at least see who
is visiting.
Brief overview year by year.
2004 exploits, as recorded in this our web travelogue, commence in April
as we leave Ramsgate hoping to eventually reach St Petersburg in Russia. And then,
in sailing 3500 miles, we visit 10 different countries and many of the off lying
islands of those countries. We experience Baltic weather very much in line with
seasonal norms, and though ice is still being reported in Finland late in May, we
still feel we had a warm summer. All of the places and many of the people we meet
are mentioned, we also show how important it is to be fully self-sufficient and
carry a huge inventory of spares. Whether we had all of the spares we needed you
will find out.
Our journey of 2004 covers 6 months and we learned that we should really have left
the Baltic one month earlier as the weather during September was becoming hostile.
No surprise really because we should have expected prevailing SW winds to mean we�d
have to beat for 1000 miles. Sitting here now though, whilst writing this brief
synopsis, I�m really only remembering the good times, and they were plentiful. I
hope you enjoy our journey.
In 2005,following an enjoyable but unplanned winter in Eastbourne marina
we sail for France hoping to reach The Algarve in Portugal by autumn. We experience
a few dramatic passages even before we arrive in Biscay and then we meet a couple
of old friends from Shotley Point Marina who are enjoying early season sun in La
Rochelle.
Whilst in La Rochelle we exchange Mithril for a brand-new Dufour 40 Performance
yacht. The rest of the season is spent in the North and West of Biscay in areas,
whilst being pretty close to UK shores, are very new to us. We learn to sail a performance
yacht and have numerous trips to the Dufour factory. In parting with Mithril we
are interviewed by a French sailing magazine and it results in a seven double-pages
spread in the magazine. Maybe that now makes us famous!
Latest: We are now back in the UK and Ruby
Tuesday has been sold. It was with great sadness that we parted with her but the
original plan was for 5 years afloat and that most wonderful task had been accomplished.
Click for Latest Update or see our latest
hobby, Click for Tandem pages
Also note that the whole site is currently being updated to conform to latest browser
requirements. This is being done page by page and, with over 100 pages, the update
will be slow to complete. This will mean some pages are rendered less well than
others.
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