Sailing Fair Isle Archive – Page 6

Thanks to Babbel for sponsoring today's video. Go to https://strms.net/babbel_svfairisle to get up to 60% off your subscription today. If there are any boat gadgets, or just generally useful things you've found to have aboard please do let us know and we ...

Lots of sailing in this episode as we battle our way through the Balearics and over to the Spanish mainland towards Gibraltar. We get a real mix of conditions, some interesting sea life and battle broken boat bits... so just normal sailing then! ----------...

Gibraltar is tiny but full of surprises. If you're a sailor it's one of the must see places in the world. We stop by in this last outpost in the Mediterranean to start the process of getting ready for trade wind ocean sailing. Gibraltar is a great place t...

We previously put together a video on choosing a foresail and went through the process of having it designed and made . This video focuses on doing the same with our mainsail and also on tuning the rig to get the best out of the new sails. We get all our ...

After four years, two lockdowns and 14 countries we have completed a pretty good lap of the Med and are now making our way West out of the Strait of Gibraltar and into the Atlantic ocean. The Western passage through the strait is always a much more tricky...

These solar power stations are one of the most useful things you can have on a cruising boat and they just keep getting better! The Allpowers R2500 is a solid performer, to be honest all the different power stations we've used have performed exactly as de...

As fantastic as the Mediterranean is, sometimes the anchorages can get a bit packed. They are also subject to the swells in the Med which sometimes come out of nowhere when you least expect them. This is one of the reasons we love the lagoon anchorages in ...

We've tested a lot of these devices now and we have several on board because they are so useful. The EcoFlow units are especially good as they link together very efficiently via a DC-DC cable. We've had the generator and our Delta devices for over a year n...

I've been searching for the ultimate drone to have aboard your boat for some time and I've now come the closest yet to finding it. Swell Pro have pulled out all the stops with this one, it's a massive improvement over the Splash drone 3 which I reviewed ...

Yes it's that time of year again! No one does a boat show quite like Annapolis and this year we had hot sun for most of it so feel very lucky. There were lots of boats to see and even more gadgets but I have to admit Annapolis has become a place to meet up...

We don't have built in AC on our boat and frankly I'm glad. It adds complexity, is power hungry and if you have the whole boat air conditioned you tend not to acclimatise to where you are and end up inside rather than out enjoying the wonderful places we v...

Sailing is a roller coaster in so many ways. Time in the boatyard is never one of the highs it has to be said, but so far our lifts have gone smoothly and to plan. Not this time! I did have plans to tackle some areas of the boat that I had never had apart...

Regular viewers will have seen us battle to keep our dark green gel coat on Fair Isle looking goos over the years. We've tried all sorts or restoration methods and protective coatings like top end nano technology ceramic coatings. We actually thought our g...

After finding out that our compression post had sunk slightly the decision was made to pull the mast to find out what was going on in the bilges of Fair Isle. Everything about Hans Christian boats is solid, we've never found anything other than quality eng...

This lift in Lagos, Portugal was our last lift before crossing the Atlantic and it was supposed to be a straight forward bottom job. But I had been monitoring a possible problem with the mast where the cross member support seemed to be slipping. It was a s...

I've tried to go through as much as possible in this video with the setup, mounting, disabling of the motors and tariffs in this video and I will add any extra things we find out that maybe of use in the description here. So any thing we find out I'll list...

This is the worst prolonged storm we've been caught in on Fair Isle, three days of constant winds the wrong side of 30 knots and regular gusts up to 48 knots at the height of the storm. This intense low developed very quickly out of a cold front that was ...

Here's some info on the items in the video in the order we showed them: Blu3: This Nomad version of Blu3's hooker system takes over from it's smaller brother the Nemo, which had a 10ft hose. The Nomad can take you down to 30 feet and has a much bigger bat...

This has got to be the best place in Europe to sail in the winter. In fact having sailed most places in Europe in winter over the year I can safely say there is no comparison! Trade wind sailing, Xmas on the beach in hot sun and rain forest like mountains ...

There was a lot of prep to do on the boat to get ready for our 10 day trip down to Africa from the Canary Islands and then our Atlantic crossing to the Caribbean. We were promised trade wind sailing for this trip but as always there are many challenges alo...

In the last episode we showed some of the challenges to sailing down the West coast of Africa, so what are things like when you make landfall? Well in a word shallow! There are some beautiful mangrove areas within the delta area of Southern Senegal, and th...

We are currently sailing across the Atlantic ending our European and African chapters of this journey. Since I have time on my hands! and we have Starlink, I thought we would post as series of shorts showing some of the fantastic place we've visited and e...

Sailing off the beaten track has its challenges and we've certainly come up against some difficult navigation and odd behaviour at sea while in these waters, but the pay back is off the scale. We've had the privilege of anchoring in some of the most beauti...

We set sail from Cape Verde to Trinidad and have a good following wind but very lumpy seas. And it stays that way for the first 13 days! It's like living in a tumble dryer. Even the simplest tasks take a degree of energy we don't always have. But we are mo...

The final part of our Atlantic crossing wasn't straight forward. Trinidad is a big island and the anchorages are on the Western side, sheltered from the Atlantic swell. So once you sight land you still have a full day (or night in our case) of sailing to n...

Most people come to Trinidad to work on their boats and it's a great place for that. But if you haul out here don't miss the opportunity to hire a car and visit the interior of this fabulous island. In this weeks episode we haul the boat out and get on wit...

This was an unscheduled haul out in Trinidad a place that's a favorite location for boat work and where we've met up with some interesting people and their boats. In the last episode we featured Jim and his major renovations of a Bop Perry classic, this w...

The Caribbean cruising adventure begins! Trinidad was lovely, but it's more a place that sailors go to work on their boats than it is a full on cruising destination. So our night sail up to Grenada marked the start of our Caribbean cruising we felt. The se...

There's lots to do in Grenada on and off shore. Diving on the underwater statues in the marine park was a real experience and we get out first taste of Lionfish, delicious! As with everything in life there are challenges though as Judy has to make an unexp...