Last Sunday was another beautiful blue sky day and although it was a bit chilly we took ourselves along the coast a wee bit to Aberdour. If we ever win the lottery (I have no hope of it) one of the first things which I would spend some money on is a sailing course. Whenever I see yachts I think how great it would be if we could just hop on a boat and sail down to the Devon/ Cornwall area instead of driving on motorways for about 700 miles. Mind you it would be no easy task because the coast is so dangerous and rocky. Hence the need for a sailing course.
This is a photograph of a couple of the islands in the Firth of Forth, just off the village of Aberdour. The right hand one is Inchcolm. You can just see the Abbey.
This one is of just beyond the harbour, you can see a very remote hotel in the distance.
This is the view from Aberdour beach, looking over the Forth towards Edinburgh. We walked a couple of miles along the coastal path and up through the village so we got a bit of exercise before embarking on our Sunday dinner. Not a bad day.
Had I known you were interested in sailing, I would have attempted to sell you our sailboat – which has just gone to her new home in Chicago. I think she’ll miss New England waters, though.
Jack’s been a sailor for the last thirty years. I learned but never enjoyed it. (I was an equestrian of sorts and we used to race cars.) Jack’s very competitive, so his second boat, Jouster, was a racing sailboat. He won a lot of trophies and sailed all over New England, the East Coast, and up to Nova Scotia. He’d still like to do a trans-Atlantic. I’d rather read about it than do it.
I showed him your blog today and I think he got a little misty. We just sold the boat and he’s still having many moments of regret.
Joan,
I must admit I’ve never been sailing in a small boat but I’ve always fancied doing it. Even a rowing boat on a small river would suit me and I’ve done a bit of rowing about on lochs. Your Jack is a serious sailor but trans-Atlantic is scary. Horses are very popular with girls around here but I just like to look at them from a distance, they’re a bit big!
We are just armchair F1 racing fans, the whole family is into it and it started off with me as a youngster because Jackie Stewart and his family lived near us in Dumbarton so he was the local hero. I don’t think it’s very big in the US.
When you retire maybe you can do a trade with him. He can have a new boat if you get a garden!
I have a lovely canoe, a birthday present from Jack many years ago. In New England, we used to canoe on the local rivers and I loved that I’m more of a Wind in the Willows person than a Joshua Slocum. But the rivers on both sides of Philadelphia are huge, too big for me, and we have no place to store my canoe at our house. So, she’s been living at my niece’s in Tarrytown, NY, and I haven’t used it for over five years. Sad.
I wouldn’t like Jack to do a trans-Atlantic, but I wouldn’t ask him not to. When he raced from Marblehead (MA) to Halifax, Nova Scotia, they had transponders on the boats so people could track the progress of the boats on their computers in almost real time. It made me nervous, though, because I was afraid his marker would disappear from the screen!
Joan,
Gordon, our youngest son used to be keen on canoeing in a nearby loch but he was in a club so it was their canoe. Then exams got in the way and now he’s into running, squash and badminton. Badminton was Jack’s thing but now we stick to long walks and hill walking. Messing about on a river like something out of The Wind in the Willows would be a wonderful way of relaxing but as you say it has to be a tame wee river and it should have lovely trees, especially willows drooping into it and lots of wildlife. Oh well, we can dream!
I suppose technology is supposed to make things safer and less of a worry but it must have been horrible from your end of things, the imagination tends to run wild at the best of times. I don’t think I would like to sail if I wasn’t within sight of land, coast hugging appeals to me!
You take some really good photos. The scenery always looks so wonderful there, but it looked quite chilly!
Always worth a walk when there is a Sunday Dinner at the end of it!
Jo,
Thanks. It was a wee bit chilly to begin with but we ended up too warm while we were walking.
We always have a Sunday Dinner, it’s the only day we have a pudding too! It’s strange doing it just for 2 most of the time now as our sons have moved out, but I decided to keep the tradition up.