Draycote Christmas?

Google Maps have update their images of Draycote Water and the surrounding areas recently.

What the hell is that white stuff on the water?? Anyone got any ideas?

Is it:

• Snow?
• Ice?
• White-Horses?
• Reflections?
• Lots of white boats with white sails??

View Larger Map

I would be extremely interested to know what you think the white areas on the water actually are..let me know in the comments...

Technorati Tags: Soulsailor,Sailing,Draycote,Google Maps

Long time...

Time is just not on my side currently, it's trickling away from me faster than the tide...

So, quick re-cap before Monday morning grabs me and the melody-go-round fires off again!

Midland areas at Staunton Harold, 20 boats, kinda dissapointing I think? wind was fairly light, sun was out for a bit then it rained solid for the night and next day! We had a good first race, first round the windward mark, but then lost a fair bit and ended up 6th... after that it went bad...stabalised and basically although it was a good weekend, close racing, great beer (including the Captain G&T that me and Steve invented), broken sleep with the rain thudding on the roof and then more average sailing in the rain...sigh, we ended up 10th.... not happy really with that...again... getting boring this me not being happy with my results!

Then last Sunday I took the kids out in my dads Solo for the first time in a while... Youngest is a bit of a nutter / ninja-crew in the boat... no fear and really loves it, eldest is a little more controlled but once I got him helming he got really into it...so much so that I managed to get 5 mins sat on the foredeck, legs round the mast being a kid again! BVloody fantastic hour and a half sailing!

Then this weekend there was 2 days of "fun" at the club.... Saturday evening there was a BBQ and disco.... the sun was very warm, no breeze the BBQ was great...especially the toasted marshmallows, I had a good few mints of "Hooky", we watched the sun set with the kids playing on the shore and the music drifting out of the clubhouse... I find that kinda think amazingly chilling...

Then today was the inter-fleet champs... 6 teams of 10 or more sailors form the different fleets - Managerie, Fireball, Youth&Juniors, Miracle, Flying 15's and Solo's... very short races (10-15 mins) infront of the club house in either Laser 2's, Laser Vago's or Pico's... I had the pleasure of sailing with Lance (crewing once, we came 4th) and helming twice...first in both :-) the rest of the team had some good races and some bad... my dad capsized in 3rd place on the finish-line in the Pico...not happy! In the end after a stilt-walker, magicion, bouncy-castle, sumo-suit wrestling, sailing demo's, windsurfing have-a-go's and stacks of races.... Youth&Juniors won... well done... we came 4th or 5th but it was a fun day, I think and the wind held up and the sun shone so most people were smiling as they went home.....

Anyway lastly, best give you the recipe for Captain G&T:

Any Good landlord will tell you to stop drinking if you order this becuase in order to drink it you must have drunk way too much already....

The woman at Staunton Harold that served us obviosuly hadnt though it through... so:

Captain G&T
1 measure of Gin
1 measure of Captains Rum
Some Tonic
Shaken and Slurred

...it turns a lovely golden colour and tastes like crap... still and midnight-ish who actually cares...?
sailing boat soulsailor

CloudSpotting

So my wife bought me this book that I thought might be interesting... it's call the The Cloudspotter’s Guide and is all about an intro to the Cloud Appreciation Society and the history, art, pics, poerty and science behind clouds...

There's 7508 members of the society which is pretty amazing, and membership costs just a few quid per year through PayPal so it may not be long before I add one to their membership total!

So why is this of interest to me? Well it's clouds, clouds are part opf the weather and the weather gives way to wind, waves and all manner of boat affecting things... So I think it's worth reading about them, learning what they are upto and starting to understand what weather changes and more specifically wind changes they bring with them...

The founder, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, who is also cofounderof The Idler magazine says:

At The Cloud Appreciation Society we love clouds, we’re not ashamed to
say it and we’ve had enough of people moaning about them.Read our
manifesto and see how we are fighting the banality of ‘blue-sky
thinking’

Also in their manifesto they say (among other things):

We think that they are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her
displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

I would have to agree and taking time out to sit and chill and watch the clouds wend their way across your space and time is very Zen (be that on land or sea!)and very rewarding, especially as they're giving away the secrets to those who understand them of what the weather is gonna be doing, thus giving us the sailors the upper-hand over our stressed out non-cloud-gazing competitors!!

So what do I think of all this then? Well I'm only a hand-ful of pages through the book as yet, but it reads well, is enjoyable and I'm starting to learn stuff.... the website is well created and functional. I would say, and Gavin Pretor-Pinney if your reading this take this as positive advice, the site could do with some "newer community features"... I was going to say for them to forget their picture page and embed a Flickr viewer, well it seems there is a CloudAppreciation Flickr Group so thats a bloody good start.. What I did find suprising was that YouTube had no real content on Cloud Video's which is a real shame.... maybe something to think about?

Anyway, its worth checking out, get some cloudspotting done, relax and maybe learn a little about predicting those damned windshifts!

sailing boat soulsailor weather clouds