Seebock

It’s spring. Deep breath. Smile. On Sunday we built up the catamaran, our Dart 18, the Seebock. It’s now sitting down by the beautiful Ammersee, ready to go. Looks good, but could use a new trampoline and some lines. The water was 7.5 degrees centigrade, brrrr, so we decided to go and have potato-leek soup […]

Grammar Guru: 90′ x 90′

“The boat is very simple. It’s a 90 foot x 90 foot platform, trimaran, with three hulls, with a magic wing, close to 200 feet high.” Read “90 by 90“, “90 times 90” or “90 to 90“? In 1851, a boat named America won the 100 Guinea Cup in a race around the Isle of […]

Yellow jacket

When we put away the sailboat at the end of our stay on Drummond, we managed to set the trailer right down on a nest of yellow jackets in an old rotten log – or perhaps it was a nest up in a tree, we’re not quite sure. We didn’t notice it right away. But […]

Makeshift

Everything on Drummond is makeshift. Metal things rust and break, lines fray, material rots and decays, so you are forever fixing things with spare parts and tools that themselves are anything but new. There’s a hardware store on the island that sells pretty much anything you need, and over on the mainland there’s a huge […]

Question: What’s your happy day?

http://annehodgson.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/happyday.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadPerhaps it’s a sign of the times, but several magazines here in Germany (Spiegel and Focus) have featured “happiness” as their title story. Well, it’s clearly a good thing to think about and discuss. The Beatles sang “Happiness is a warm gun”, with more than a touch of irony. […]

Overboard

This is a slightly embarrassing story, but the reactions it’s been getting tell me: You have to make a fool of yourself and tell everyone about it from time to time. So here goes. Down in Croatia with ABC Wassersport, on board the Taiga, a 37 foot Bavaria sailboat, I managed to go overboard.