I was fortunate enough to grow up eating homemade bread. Every few months my Dad would arrive home from town with a 100 pound bag of flour. He would heave it out of the back of his Volvo station wagon and appear in the doorway of the kitchen with it resting on his shoulder, like…
Newton’s Laws & Life Onboard
Life, I find, often gets in the way of our aspirations. A diesel leak forces you to spend two hours on your hands and knees, elbow deep in the bilge huffing fumes and sweating through the good t-shirt you put on in the morning expecting not to get too sweaty or grimy. A routine dentist…
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Reading Round Up
I usually post a reading round up when I have a few pieces that have been published in print magazines. As I am always looking for recommendations of things to read/listen to, I thought it might be nice to share three things that I have been reading/listening to recently instead. I just unearthed the box…
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Galley Notes : The Comfort of Confit Garlic
I‘ve always been a bit of a worrier. When the wind picks up in the middle of the night I can’t just lay there knowing we are ok, I have to get out of bed to check our position. When I have an unexplained ache or pain I have been known to jump to the…
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Composting Toilet 5- Year Review
It has been five years since we installed a composting AirHead toilet onboard Kate and the other day, while giving the unit it’s monthly deep clean, I thought it might be handy to tell you what we like, what we’ve learned, and what we’ve improved. (I wrote about how a composting toilet works, and how…
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Sustainable Sailing: The Ukay Ukay & Upcycling Bedsheets
As the third of four children I grew up in hand-me-downs. Clothing was passed down from older siblings, an extensive circle of cousins, and bought from Frenchy’s, some may argue a now iconic secondhand store. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford new, in fact I have several favourite outfit memories that were new clothes (My…
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Galley Notes : The Glow Up
Kate’s galley has always been well looked after – the wood varnished, the countertops oiled, the sink scrubbed clean – but after 17 years living onboard it was starting to look a little dingy. The countertops that were installed shortly before we bought Kate were constructed out of 4-inch strips of thin hardwood, glued down…
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Reading Round Up
Seeing as it is still January, and therefore people are ok with being all nostalgic about years past, I thought I’d take the opportunity to post a round up of the articles that were published in Cruising World Magazine 2025. I got back into the swing of things by writing a feature on a 126-year-old…
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Galley Notes: Babaganoush on a Rainy Day
Eggplant has long been the bane of my culinary existence. It grows in abundance in the tropics and so has been a constant at the markets for as long as I can remember. They are usually of the Asian variety, long and thin, pale purple or with stripes of white, small seeds. I’ve seen them…
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2025 Recap & Catch Up
2025 was a hard year. I can say this because we spent the entirety of it in the boatyard in Kudat, Borneo, Malaysia. This was not the plan, of course. Which is maybe why hauling out sometimes feels like voluntarily checking into an insane asylum- an olde tyme one that only requires one signature to…
