JP paps Pippa!

Yes, the trending topic of the day, Miss Pippa, is again here in all her glory.

Top pap JP managed to take these EXCLUSIVE pictures of Miss All-White herself, charming none other than Prince Philip on a discrete balcony in London, SW.

HM was not amused and before you could say "corgi" he'd been giving his marching orders. But the lovely Miss Middleton was not left alone, for she was joined by dashing Prince Harry, and what a lovely couple they made:

As to whether there's anything going on there - well pip-Pippa's the word!

It's not all about hats

For some reason Tillerman's been obsessing with hats.

I can't understand why: as the photo above clearly shows the sensation of this royal wedding was entirely hat free.

The Captain and his hat

I do not like this style of hat.

It comes over as either somewhat old fashioned and paradoxically un-nautical, more at home at a fancy dress party, and with a whiff of camp about it as well.

Real sailors know that such hats would be blown away come the first gust and instead have eyes sunken into the skull to escape the salty spray (in theory anyway).

Now I have a boating trip coming up shortly (more anon) and was going to go hatless, until my brother-in-law made a very good point. When, he said, I let my nephews and nieces have a turn at the wheel what could be better - to make it official and show the importance of concentrating on our course - than lending them the skipper hat's.

Hmmmm..... this might require further consideration.....

Random Sailor to Circumnavigate by Chance

Ok, this is a weird one. Rob Clark (above) wants to sail single handed around the world. Yawn you go, join the queue.

But he wants his route to be decided by a combination of chance, at the throw of a dice, and by the collective will of the sailing internet by voting on his web site.

To be honest to me it makes Big Brother seem sane, but maybe I've missed something.

More here.

Sailing to New Zealand aged 102

Amazing story of 102 year old Eric King-Turner who is about to emigrate to a new life in his wife Doris's home country, New Zealand. They are travelling there by ship - maybe to remind him of the old days in WW2 when he served on HMS Invincible.

There's no holding back this old sailor - they got married 12 years ago, when he must have been about 90!

Good luck to them in their new life.

New Laptop

It's another first blog post, this time first with the new laptop. Still learning which button does what so - bother not that one - where was I - yes, so might be slow posting for a bit.

Also might have lost some data in the old hard disk which is now in the freezer (literally - its meant to be one way to recover data)

Laptop dead....

.... so there will be no posting or email for a bit while buy another one and try to recover the old hard disk