It seems such a long time since we had our last cruise, our trip to Atherstone at the end of October. We’ve been busy nevertheless and now the interior of the boat is complete. A quick walk through from bow to stern shows a variety of improvements; new carpets, curtains and cushion covers. The kitchen area has been re-tiled and an inverter fitted to power up the television, DVD, satellite system and hi-fi. Other electrical improvements include a new mains inlet, new lamps fitted throughout and additional 12 volt sockets inside.

Holidays, work and bad weather has prevented any more cruising since Atherstone but hopefully the weather will be kind enough to let us out for a few days at Christmas, sheer madness of course but the desire to get PhoenixIII out again is overwhelming.

The dark evenings are quite limiting as far as work on the boat is concerned so we have been busy with other things and one of them has been to design some PhoenixIII branded goods. We ordered some items for ourselves and were pleased with the quality so now we have some nice T-shirts, baseball caps and coffee mugs. We also got the boat’s mascot, a teddy bear with a printed shirt and because we were unsure of a name to give him, we decided to run a competition to name the teddy. What we didn’t realise was that in Sudan, a British teacher was in a spot of bother for the doing a similar sort of thing, therefore the competition has been cancelled and the mascot is called Ted!