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November 2004

The Newsletter of Spinnaker Club, Ringwood

www.spinnakerclub.co.uk

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Sailability

New Forest Sailability has had another excellent year at Spinnaker.

About 35 energetic, but mostly elderly, volunteers have assisted over one hundred people with disabilities to sail. We still need more help!

Our Access dinghies are supposed to be un-capsizable and unsinkable so we decided to give it a try. To capsize, both of us had to put all our weight on one side. She then went down with the sail flat on the water and wouldn't go any further. All the time she was trying to right herself.

When she came up we were able to sail her back to the pontoon with no trouble. It's given us even more confidence than we had before. These dinghies really are safe! They may look like bathtubs but they sail quite well too! Rory Morrison

Rory talk

Eric, my husband, and I are giving a slide show/talk about the second half of our Round the World Voyage in "Sentinel", a 38' Bruce Roberts designed steel cutter. This will be at Spinnaker on Tuesday afternoon, 11 January 2005 at 2pm. Entry £2 per person. Proceeds to Sailability. Rory Morrison

Round the world

In 1988 when my husband, Eric, was 64 1/2 we sold a boat, bought a 38' steel cutter and set sail.

In Tenerife we picked up the third member of our crew, a 6-week-old tiny black feline which we called Ted, short for Teide.

The next 5 years were to be the best in our lives. We loved the long ocean passages, were fascinated by the wild life and the different cultures. You only had to drop anchor in a lonely island bay to be invited ashore for a meal.

Highlights were three weeks sailing the Galapagos for which we were lucky enough to obtain a permit, New Zealand where we might well have settled, and the life of the Indian Ocean where we drifted along at 2 or 3 knots accompanied by blue fish in the bow wave, green fish in the stern wave, tiny crabs, dolphins, whales and skein upon skein of what looked like giant toad spawn. What fish had produced that we have never discovered.

Would I do it again? Yes, tomorrow! But now I have to content myself with sailing Access dinghies! Rory Morrison