January 2014 – Velvet Lady's Blog

A metre of snow in Arabba

We are enjoying our annual skiing holiday at the moment, this year in Arabba Italy. It snowed a metre of snow the night before we arrived and continued snowing on our first day. Then we had fabulous skiing conditions in clear sky and sunshine until our last day, today when it clouded over and snowed again – lucky for next weeks punters.

Off to do some packing now and back to Velvet Lady on Sunday. The spring is full now apart from 2 places in February and 1 place on the Azores to Plymouth leg.

Back to the lovely Lofoten Islands this summer – still a few places so why not take a look at our schedule and join us

Velvet Lady back in the water

Velvet Lady, now scrubbed and polished is back in the water in Marina Rubicon ready for sailing in 2014. We get a lot of questions on board about what kind of keel we have, so I have taken this photo with Richard standing under the boat showing the keel. It starts from just forward of the mast and goes aft to the end of the boom , level with the lifering holders.

The boys in the yard did a great job of sanding off all the old antifouling and her bottom is as smooth as a baby’s. With that and the new mainsail we fitted in October we expect her to go really fast this spring. Why not join us

View from Velvet Lady in the boatyard

Velvet Lady is now on the hard in the boatyard in Marina Rubicon. From our vantage point we can keep an eye on all of the comings and goings in the marina, look across to Fuerteventura and get a great view of Playa Blanca, above!

Work is ongoing – and we should relaunch on Tuesday/Wednesday.

Our website problems are now fixed, we have checked every page of the site and we believe it is all now working – do let us know if you have any problems.

The booking system is working properly, and has been busy. We now only have 2 spaces left in Lanzarote, then next spaces after that being Azores to Plymouth, and still some spaces in the Lofoten Islands – why not join us there.

Website Problems

Happy New Year to all our customers past and future

It would appear that whilst Santas good elves were working hard during the holiday season delivering presents, The bad elves were working at disrupting the internet!!

We appear to have a few little gremlins on our site at the moment and some of the pages are not working correctly. Believe me we are working as hard as we can to get this problem fixed, but we assure you we are still here!
Whilst the website booking system is not working properly, we are able to take bookings over the telephone, so if you are interested in a trip on our schedule – which is working correctly and the number of places available is correct – please do not hesitate to call me on 07801 627660 and I can take your details and process the booking manually. If you call and get the message service I will call back as I might be at the top of a ladder!

We had a great week for New Year, sailing around Lanzarote and up to Gracios. We celebrated New Year the Spanish way, staying in and having a ‘family meal’ before seeing in the New Year at midnight by eating grapes, 1 per bong of the bell! In the time between dinner and midnight we had a really great entertaining game of Charades, boys versus girls, with the boys winning.

We had plenty of sunshine but could have done with a bit more wind.

Back in Rubicon now and just getting ready to lift Velvet Lady out of the water for her annual coat of antifouling. Lets hope it doesn’t rain

All the best for 2014, look forward to seeing you on board

Lin and Richard