Log

The Ship’s Log covers journeys undertaken by sail or canal boat, and includes general posts not covered by the Travel category.

An Old Friend Comes To Town

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The weather has broken, Marmaris is surrounded by storm clouds and its dreary foreboding is compounded by the fact I’m packing to return to the UK; so let’s step back in time to sunnier days when Matt and Candice came out to visit. We took in some of Turkey’s finest coast line and Greece’s jewel, Simi. This log is written by Matt, who’s comedy prose is accompanied by some fantastic photographs. It concludes with an entry by Siobhan, who came all the way from South Africa to visit us for a couple of days! We are honoured.

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A Day In The Life At Anchor In Turkey

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Introducing a new series on followtheboat: A Day In The Life. In this new category we take one day and break it down for you, hour by hour, offering a lighthearted view on what it’s like to spend 24 hours aboard Esper. In our first essay we examine an average day at anchor in Turkey, from dragging anchors and evil clerics to woodland creatures and smelly poo.

Oh, and if you’re using Internet Explorer 6, we’ve finally got round to fixing a display errors in the website – of course you should have upgraded or migrated to Firefox by now 😉

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Christer Klingwall of ‘Lady Jessie’: A Tribute

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It is with great sadness that we announce the tragic death of Christer Klingwall, owner and skipper of ‘Lady Jessie’, who took his own life last Monday, 20th April.

We would like to pay our respects to our sailing buddy by posting up some pictures and thoughts on followtheboat, which featured Christer in our last video clip. Mayke, Christer’s ex-wife with whom he remained close, said ‘Christer would love the idea of a tribute’. This article, then, will be a continually updated and amended page dedicated to a great sailor. If you would like to add your own comment, thought or photograph then please either use the comments form at the end of the article or email us.

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The Yin and Yang Of Sailing

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This of course puts us into emergency mode and the wind soon catches Esper and as the motors off without even so much as an apologetic glance back over his shoulder, we are left trying to steady our boat. We soon find ourselves sideways onto the pontoon, engine on with no wheel to steer ourselves away.

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Goat-Milking, Wellington-Wearing Local Girls

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Once again, the sweet farmer’s daughter comes running down to us and apologises that dinner will not be ready for a while as she is milking the cow and off she runs. Though we don’t hear said cow, as we play our game of Rumicub, we are surrounded by bleating goats, hooting owls, braying donkeys, jumping fish and crowing cockerels – life on this island is actually quite noisy!

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Tasty tortoises & magical langoustines. No, hold on…

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I only see him move once, and this was to pass us the bill. He limps his huge mass towards us and smiles through toad-like eyes. I imagine he is probably very good friend with James Bond, he seems to know everybody and things seemed to work around him to his satisfaction – whether this is down to wealth, culture or bloody hard work, I do not know, what I do know is it looks like a good life.

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Diazepam & Egg Muffin To Go

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Seeing Jamie and Liz in their current home was quite emotional for me. For them to come and see my new house in North Essex was a walk in the park, for me to see them six hours from my front door was an achievement only blood can fuel. Touching, smelling, seeing Esper is something I can now carry with me for the rest of my life – now begins my account of Follow the Boat.

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Veggie Wars

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Pubs, beer and good paintbrushes vs good food, space and great climate. Which would you prefer? My extended trip back to the UK has been a real eye-opener but I frequently caught myself saying things like ‘it’s not like that in Turkey’. I can’t help it. I’ve made Turkey my temporary home but I’ve just spent a month back at my parents, in the bedroom I grew up in, and I quickly became British again. Now I’m returning to Turkey and I can’t help but compare and contrast. It’s an interesting exercise, but which is better? Turkey or England?

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A New Way To Navigate FTB!

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In the last six years followtheboat has sailed over 10,000 nautical miles and visited many countries. Those familiar to FTB will know that we avoid boring you with sailing yarns, preferring to entertain through amusing and considered observation, accompanied by great photographs. Some people use our website as a resource and want to learn more about the places we have observed. Others just like to see if we have visited places they’ve been to. However you use followtheboat you will find our latest ‘Places’ page very useful as it helps navigate through the blog via geographic location.

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So When Are We Going To Go Somewhere?

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We bought Esper at the end of 2004 and now it’s February 2009. In that time all we’ve done is sailed from Bodrum to Fethiye. Big deal. Weren’t we supposed to be going round the world? Anyone else out there get similar remarks from armchair sailors and landlubbers? I heard that a lot on my last visit home to the UK and I bet Jamie’s hearing it right now. Funny how it’s only people without a boat who make these remarks… What non boat dwellers don’t understand is how long everything takes. Well, for those people who wonder what we ‘do all day’ and why we haven’t got very far, here are a few things to think about:

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We’ll Keep the Boat Flag Flying Here

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Is your burgee lower than your shabby courtesy flag, and are they both on the port side? Does your ensign fly freely all night and does your ‘Eng-er-land’ flag fly proudly? Oh my. What about your private signals, or shouldn’t I ask? Find out why the national flags of Libya and Nepal are unique with Millie’s vexillological treatise. She’s been doing a little research and come up with her own slant on flag etiquette. There’s a couple of new photos of her too, but you wouldn’t expect anything less.

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Samsung NC10 Netbook

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This is the first in our new series of reviews, entitled ‘Testing, testing…’. In this section we comment on gear we’ve either begged, borrowed or nicked, new or second hand. In fact it’s less of a ‘review’ and more of a ‘how and why we bought this product and here’s how we got on with of it’. By documenting our experiences we hope to impart some useful user experience. Some of the reviews will be ongoing and we encourage your comments.

Before you non-yotties switch off for fear of our first review being about that handy life-raft for on-board cats we thought we’d start with a cool bit of electronic gadgetry, the Samsung NC10 netbook. If you’re looking for a really portable but fully functional PC, you may be interested to learn about this shockingly cheap laptop. For the yotties amongst you this could just be the solution to your on-board computing requirements. Seriously.

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Welcome To The New FTB Site!

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Welcome to the new Followtheboat website! This complete revamp is quite a departure from our old site and we have spent rather a lot of time rebuilding it. But why? It’s only a silly old travelogue! The fact was it was getting to be rather a handful and were forced to make some essential changes. It’s all for the best!

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