Welcome to the Blog
After years of procrastinating I've finally registered a 'proper' URL and moved to Blogger from SailBlogs, as I felt their layout was quite 'restrictive'. The SailBlogs mapping integration was brilliant, but after reading a post on one of the sailing forums I follow recommending the website No Foreign Land would do the same thing. That was the straw that made the decision for me and I crossed platforms, never an easy task.
You will spot a several rough edges before I get round to fixing them.
The blog was created as my onboard log keeping is worse than hopeless and I wanted to develop the discipline of 'reasonable log keeping' in order to be able to look back at what I've done on Aphrodite over the last few years.
As an old IT geek I still like to use some html and see a webpage develop. I have had some fun with tables and think I have finally got them into a format I like.
I'm very much a cruising sailor. Speed, in any form, has never interested me and I can't get my head round why anybody would want to race past a coast at 15 knots and miss all of the amazing sights and sounds that there is to be seen and heard.
In addition to sailing Aphrodite I volunteer with the Ocean Youth Trust South as Sea Staff and crew on the occasional delivery with Halcyon Yachts.
All times on the boat are UTC as this makes a whole raft of calculations a lot easier and I have kept that format here. I just need to remember to change to 'land time' when I step ashore, so not to be late for the pub. Actually, it proved useful on the Faro to Falmouth trip in 2022 as Portugal follows Western European Time (WET) and Western European Summer Time (WEST) in summer. Spain and France follow Central European Time (CET) and Central European Summer Time (CEST). I just added one or two hours when walking ashore while the rest of the crew confused themselves.
Over time the layout of posts have evolved and I'm beginning to settle on one post for each 24 hour period on as I felt that having one post for a longer passage was confusing.
While underway I transmit on AIS and can be found on the Marine Traffic Website, if I am in range of one of their receiving stations. Take a look here or better still click on the Finding Aphrodite page.
Weather Forecast
Being a huge fan of the Shipping Forecast on the BBC I try and post the shipping forecast for the sea area that I am sailing in on each post, along with the synoptic chart. Like most sailors I use several forecasting tools including the inshore forecast which has a bit, but not much, more nuance.
Contact and Social Media
The boat has an email address
gibsea96aphrodite [at] gmail [dot] com
and I post on Twitter and Instagram as @sail_aphrodite
Updated: 29/02/2024