Christmas presents with a bit of a ‘boaty’ theme……

Father Christmas clearly knew I liked sailing!

Firstly, a brilliant drone to make my blog a bit more interesting, hopefully with lots of pictures of Grace sailing by – clearly people are fed up with my photography but I don’t think there is much evidence that a drone will improve it, if my ‘drone cam’ efforts so far are anything to go by!

I am trying hard to learn to fly it which so far seems to involve shredding a lot of leaves off trees and trying to avoiding landing in the water! I should have played with an X-Box when I was younger!

I am obsessed by gloves and how useless the 10 pairs that we have on Grace are at keeping your hands warm and dry!

Rubbish gloves!

We’ve both got some fantastic Gill Helmsman gloves – no not just gloves but proper gauntlets! Perfect for taking the wheel in the wind and rain! I immediately tested them by walking in -6 degrees for an hour and still had warm fingers!

Excellent gloves!

Hi-Fits are another of my many obsessions and now I finally have a pair that are actually waterproof and that fit and won’t end up round my ankles!

Not wishing to leave Grace out of the Christmas spirit; all alone in her shed in Austenborg, we have bought her an adjustable whiskerpole with all the trimmings! Hopefully that will improve her downwind performance. It will be exciting to experiment with plenty of opportunities for crash gybes! Duck!

I’ve also got more supplies of my favourite liquorice “Skipper’s Pipes” – excellent!

To bring us luck or at least to stop things getting worse, we have a bronze star for the boat. Apparently it will channel the positive energy to keep you out of trouble….that will be handy! Traditionally the stars are fixed on the end of the bowsprit – I image if we had one, there would be star imprints on every dock in Denmark! Fortunately in the absence of a bowsprit it is guaranteed to work just as well when fixed on the bulkhead!

To remind me of Copenhagen and especially of my disappointment in just how small the Little Mermaid really is I’ve a nice Royal Copenhagen pin dish with what could be ‘Grace’ sailing past in the background!

The truly Little Mermaid!