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It doesn’t seem to matter where you are this weekend: Turkey, England, Germany… it’s wet wherever you go. If the weather’s not ripping pontoons apart in Marmaris it’s holding up traffic on the M25 and making the autobahn a dangerous place to travel. For those who haven’t seen it we have some video evidence of the damage that wreaked havoc across Marmaris, recorded by Mike of ‘Roam’, hot off the press. In stark contrast to that we have a great movie of ‘Ilios’, ‘Viva Solo’, ‘Esper’, ‘Full Flight’ and ‘Lady Jessie’ all demonstrating what we like doing best. Any opportunity to send Liz off up into the air attached to a bit of string , camcorder in hand, has got to be worth the effort and she captured some fantastic video clips, which we present to you here. A pleasant musical refrain replaces the dirty-mouthed Liz battling with a shaky video camera.
I am still cock-a-hoop about having the whole boat to myself and the total attention of both of my parents all of the time. It’s great. They can be a bit over-protective sometimes though and seem to think that I’ll fall overboard at any second… pur-lease, I am a salty-sea-cat these days and I know what’s what.
My last weekend, however, was marred somewhat by a couple of idiots I met in the bar on Friday. New boat owners hailing from Essex and London they had nothing good to say about the sailing community. Or Turks for that matter. I sat and listened as they slagged off Turkish workers for being lazy, and yotties who help each other only for personal gain. Eh?

Gwen is a first generation Swedish American, though she does now claim to be Canadian: “Since Bush came to power I refuse to be acknowledged as an American. I worked in the foreign service on hardship programmes and trained in Washington before being posted to West Africa. A great experience marred only by the eleven obligatory injections. Despite majoring in a variety of subjects for 16 years I never actually got a degree so officially I wasn’t allowed to become an officer in the foreign service, but I’d built up so much experience they made me an officer anyway”.

“It’s a real eye-opener”, commented Astrid. “Another time one of our girls used to get up at four in the morning to get the milk in off the door-step. When I told her she didn’t need to do this she explained that her mother had taught her to steal milk from people’s doorsteps. She was three.” Sadly another of their foster children got into a fight in an underground station and was knocked to the tracks and killed. “Of course that was very sad”, says Astrid, “as he’d only left our care a week before.

I only have one page to document the many, many things Susann does! From chartering to exporting generators, from motorbikes to oriental dancing, Susann takes multi-tasking to the extreme. After interviewing her I now understand why some people have 27 hour clocks by their bed. This girl does it all……..

Finally, after weeks of preparing his boat for a solo voyage down the Red Sea and into the Indian Ocean at a difficult time of the year, Sam recruited a new crew member! Poppy, of s/y ‘Free’, agreed to join Sam for the majority of the journey. Poppy writes beautifully and contributes to the progress log, as well as helping Sam through a difficult journey. As I write this they have passed through the Suez Canal and already sent a number of updates and pictures

After one month of going live the site has received over 250 pledges, been translated into French, received 40,000 hits (or 4,000 unique users) and will be translated into German, Turkish and possibly Spanish. If you would like to get involved in translating into a language, please do get in touch with us.