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?

Tags: beer, culture, food, internet, market, shopping
Category: observation, rants
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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.

Tags: anchorages, navigate
Category: log
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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:

Tags: bodrum, egypt, engine, fethiye, gas, gelcoat, jewellery, maintenance, navtex, porthole, red sea, rocna, watermaker, website
Category: rants
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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.

Tags: burgee, cat, ensign, flag, house, millie, private, rya, signal, smiley
Category: millie's cat-a-log
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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.

Tags: acer, computer, computing, dell, internet, laptop, netbook, plotter, samsung
Category: testing, testing...
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