Dick Durham in Cambria’s aft cabin, picture by Matt Care
I am currently very much enjoying the RSS feed I have set up from Yachting Monthly magazine (for non-techies, it is yet another form of publishing; the magazine decides what snippets of news to ‘feed’ into this system and you sit there waiting for it to arrive). I have Yachting Monthly in my feeds partly so that I never miss a Dick Durham blog. Dick is, of course the last Mate on the Cambria in Captain Bob’s last trading days and is now a sailing writer among other things. One of his outputs is the blog in Yachting Monthly which is always short, pithy and generally able to raise a smile.
This month’s one has him bemoaning the fall from grace of a the West Mersea Yacht Club Bar as follows;
“The children were kicking crabs along the pontoon, the last time I came ashore at West Mersea. Legs missing and nippers raised they fell back into the ebbing tide, not to be fooled again by easy meat on a string.
The yacht club bar – long my favourite on any coast – and one which has a painted board declaring Visiting Yachtsmen Welcome, was staffed by a plump, unfriendly young woman who asked my companion, Martyn Mackrill, dressed in reefer jacket, pink trousers and sailing boots, if he was a yachtsman. He is. ‘Which club do you belong to?’she asked.
The level of beer poured, hung by the thread of its meniscus to the imperial measure…
Something is rotten at the heart of Mersea City and environs these days and so we walk instead, across the Strood, to the excellent Peldon Rose.”
The feed also brings snippets of yachting related news, most recently about an attempt to raise money to fund a UK branded boat in the next Clipper race, some guys getting injured crashing their yacht into a wind turbine, and a love-lorn Turkish guy who sailed 2500 miles from Turkey and “turned up off the north Devon coast in his effort to become reunited with Courtney Murray from Liverpool who once served him a kebab in Cyprus seven years before”. (http://www.yachtingmonthly.com/news/533121/yachting-stalker-arrested-by-ukba).
It’s a nice lively magazine and , if you are interested in RSS feeds, then I should look it up. Good hunting.