It seems like forever since I felt like I had anything of note to say on here. Summer 2013 came and went without us doing anything worthwhile or even only slightly memorable on the sailing front. Our cruising season got overtaken by events.

Leave/time off work got moved or cut short, weather was never just quite right when we were off work, etc... The 'dirty diesel' constantly prayed on my mind. What if we get stuck somewhere, what if we can't get home, never mind the added expense.
So, I was determined not to set off unless we had a 4-5 day weather window which would allow us to sail where we wanted to go. This, of course, never materialised.

The limited time available to us would also have an effect on range. We would only be able to get to places (and back) we had already visited many, many times before. None of us were all that keen to play the same old record over again.
In the end we just pottered about a few days in local waters. The engine didn't miss a beat once (to be honest, it only had to run 3 hours since we changed all the filters and treated the diesel).

What surprised me was the ease with which we made the decision to cancel our summer cruise. No-one was broken up about it. We went for a couple of day sails and we did some other things: traveled a bit by car, our eldest took up surfing; we had family over and did other stuff together. All in all, even though we did not sail much, I don't feel like we had a bad summer.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, but I think we've gotten everything out of our present cruising ground there is for us to get. For a large, deep-keel cruising boat there are very few anchorages around here. The bits of water we can safely sail we have to share with merchantmen, even at sea you find you're constantly dodging them. And if you head abroad you have more than a 50/50 chance that at least one leg you will have to deal with 'wind on the nose'.

Time to up sticks. A change of scenery will do us good.