Where did we start from?

Having cleared the house, put much of our stuff into storage and moved on board Coromandel Quest  in the middle of May, we left Blyth at the beginning of June. 

This photograph of our house was taken when Mum was staying with us in 2006.

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 We made our first stop at Eyemouth, thanks to a squeaky helm, then we stayed in Peterhead for a few days waiting for some wind to take us north to Westray.  I wanted to spend more time there as when we've visited in the past we've been able to spend only a day or so, snatched out of Andy's precious two weeks' leave.  This photo was taken by Peter Gay when we were on Layback in Loch Ness.
We've talked about this trip for a long time, and it seems quite odd that it's now becoming a reality.  It is indeed like T H Lawrence's "dreamers of the day" - and yes! daydreaming IS dangerous!  However, we've done dangerous-type things in the past, such as doing all of the Munros - all 286 of them - in a variety of conditions; on Aonach Mor, Andy commented that he'd never seen me before with icicles on my eyelashes!  At Loch Linnhe we were frozen INTO the tent and had to light the little stove to melt the ice on the zip.  On Ciste Dubh Andy asked wistfully if we could sometime have a holiday when he didn't feel totally knackered at the end of each day!  After the Cuillin Ridge, I thought we could easily go and rob a bank as we had no fingerprints left - they'd all been rubbed off on the gabbro.

This photograph was taken on Schiehallion; I'm looking a bit grumpy, I think, although it had been a lovely day.

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I spent some time sailing in the late 70s and early 80s on a yacht called Red Marlin, an Achilles 9 Metre, crossing the Atlantic to the West Indies and then coming back via Bermuda and the Azores.   I spent three years in Barbados - gosh, that was fun!  Sadly, I've not got a single photo left of that time or of all the people I met there: Alan, Val and Debbie Knowles at The Boatyard in Bridgetown, Bizzy Williams and his supercat Catgut, Randal and Jane and their yacht Princess Pearl.  Andy and I hope to make our landfall in Barbados - then he'll be able to see what I've been rabitting on about.

After I met Andy, we had a couple of years of flotilla holidays in the Ionian Sea, before deciding to buy  a boat of our own, first Layback, a Nicholson half-tonner, and then Coromandel Quest. After that I got early retirement when AQA closed their Newcastle office following the NCT contract being given to an American company.  Fantastic!  No one ever died wishing they'd spent more time at work, so Andy and I began making our plans then.