Keep it in the family

Recently, we put out a request on the Contessa 32 Class Association website for photos to use in the new, soon to be launched Jeremy Rogers website. Looking through the Contessa 32 Facebook site I realised that although I joined the Rogers family years ago, I have yet to join the Contessa family which is really an incredible institution! There is even a Dutch Contessa 32 Assocation! I met a 32 owner today, Clive Tollett, who lives on board his boat the whole summer, laying up the boat each year where he happens to end up - (in my dreams, maybe one day)! It was such fun hearing his ideas about what might work on Calypso and seeing his genuine interest in the changes to the layout below and his enthusiasm for the project. We are really looking forward to showing all of you 32 and Contessa 26 owners around the boat at the Southampton Boat Show - and Kit and I are looking forward to joining the Contessa clan!

Don't get mad, get even!

It sounds silly, but when we started living on shore, after several years at sea, I felt really quite grateful that I could put something down on the side in the kitchen and know it would stay there. I remember getting really quite cross with the invisible bully who seemed to wait for the most inconvenient moment to push me and my belongings around - the galley was where he tended to strike! I do realise that getting cross is a really bad approach, will only make things worse and the only sensible thing to do is make your galley space as user friendly as possible. Fortunately, I'm not the first person to come across this problem and a UK company have come up with some very clever design concepts aimed at making cooking at sea a pleasure. GN Espace is run by two guys, one a sailor and product designer and the other a chef. The idea is that everything fits - so the trays from your cooker and storage boxes from the cupboard fit perfectly into the sink, the hot water comes from the Quooker, so no unnecessary kettles flying around and taking up space. The gas cooker, made in Essex, is a beauty and 30% more efficient than a regular cooker. Suddenly, I'm quite looking forward to cooking on Calypso. Bring it on bully.

Call the Police, it's teak!

I'm afraid I'm in danger of turning into a Kebony bore - but it is such a great product and such a good idea! You can get sustainably grown teak, but problem with it is that it has to grow fast in order to be sustainable, so it tends to be softer, more sappy and generally not up to scratch. Kebony, on the other hand (here she goes) uses sustainably grown wood, in our case maple but sometimes a softwood like pine, which is then placed in a vat of furfuryl alcohol (a natural and harmless byproduct of the sugar making industry) and heated. It's a clever way of mimicking the natural process which goes on during the long growth of a tropical hardwood - and the result is this incredibly durable wood, which looks and feels and weathers like the best quality teak, but is absolutely, certifiably sustainable. Apparently in Norway it's impossible to import teak and some Kebony was recently used in a local train station for seating. Within days the local council was inundated with complaints, and demands for the seating to be removed and somebody prosecuted, as people were convinced it was made out of tropical hardwood. In the end, signs had to be permanently erected explaining the provenance of the wood before the furore died down. Is this a sign of things to come in the rest of Europe? We certainly are some way behind our Norwegian friends.

Dirty secret!

I don't normally get really excited about boat gear, but there is one piece of equipment that I have a bit of an obscure liking for and that is pumps. Maybe it's something to do with the fact they could keep the boat afloat in an emergency, but I don't think so. I'm afraid it's linked to the same area of the brain that gets pleasure from cleaning hair out of the shower plug hole, or wax out of an ear (preferably not your own). It's the potential a pump has to get into the smallest, dirtiest place in the boat and clean it out. Ahem, anyway... We had a very nice man from Whale pumps, Simon McFarland crawling round the boat the other day. We were all scratching our heads figuring out where to put holding tanks (there will be two, one for grey water and another for black water) and where best to place the pumps. Whale have come up with this great new generation of pumps called Intelligent Control pumps - they come on automatically when there's a body of water over the sensor. This gets away from the old float switch style which have a tendency to get gunged up, stuck on, or not float free. It's true, there will be less opportunity for me to get my head in the bilge and free the pumps - but I can probably learn to live with it!