As I type this post I can hear car horns blaring in the distance. They’ve been going for about 2 hours solidly. Yes! It’s election-time. No! I’m not talking about the US of A.

Cyprus has a new President. Most of the world probably hasn’t noticed, unless you guys can hear the car horns from outside? You can probably hear them in Egypt. Normally you only hear car-horns blaring for ages when someone gets married here. Or, rather, I suppose, when two people get married. But anyway. Then they drive through the whole town, down the seafront, with loads of guests following with all the horns blaring.

Part of me usually thinks “there they go again! noisy so-and-sos.” in a not especially interested kind of way, another part of me thinks “lucky them” and is slightly jealous.

I’ve been doing quite a bit more work on Dad’s boat again. I really miss having access to loads of decent tools easily… Especially marline spikes and sailmaker’s palms. Also good strong needles. I’ve broken 2 so far. Sorry mum..

Anyway. This is my current “ditty bag” of stuff. (Speaking of which, I should make a real ditty bag. Another good project to start looking into…)

Needle and thimble (borrowed from mum.). A thimble kind of works as a palm if you reverse it, put the needle base inside the thimble, and push from outside.

Swiss Army knife, a birthday present from before I “ran away to sea”.

And a new mini-marlinespike/fid. (The blue thing) I think it’s supposed to be a die or other kind of hole punching thingy, but I saw it in a hardware store and thought “ha! finally!”. I need to file the end a bit, and perhaps try and drill a hole for a lanyard, but otherwise it works well.

This is the new rudder downhaul. The thicker part is “shotcord”, springy rubber-filled bungy-line, and the thinner part is a basic thin braided rope with the core taken out for flexibility. The whole is used to pull the rudder down into the water. We’re currently totally overhauling it, dad’s made a new stock (top bit) for it, and I’m stripping and varnishing the blade. This is the old rudder downhaul.

Not terribly good condition.

And here is the new join between the shotcord and regular line.

Two seized eyes together.
Same kind of work as the ladder making, just a lot smaller!

And here’s a slightly more “artsy” shot of my tools.
I’m also remaking my website, doing a total re-design and everything, this time using CSS. I’ll try and link more with this blog, and get some of the more interesting bits of the last two years as proper articles there, so it can all be linked up nicely. I’ve not done any web-design for about 3 years, so I’m a bit out of practice. It’s fun to get my hand in again. Some parts of CSS are really annoying me though. I had some ideas for the design which I think would have worked well, but I just could NOT get to work with CSS in any normal/sane way. Anyway, it’s mostly working now, designwise, I just need to add all the content to the new design, then upload everything. I’ll keep you posted.