Happy New Year

Apologies to anyone who is following the blog but Christmas and the New Year got in the way.  Our plans for 2014 are pretty much the same as for last year and we will be taking the good boat Amelie May out for another small cruise starting at Easter.  Anyone who wants to help us up the 29 locks of the Caen flight on day one is most welcome.  Our plan is then to head 'oop north' slowly over the following six months or so. 
Book writing will continue and at last my efforts seem to be paying off.  Sea Skimmer is the number one book in Naval Fiction on Amazon UK and features along with many of the others in various other categories. I'm getting more and more good reviews and sales are at record levels and increasing, who knows I might even make some money out of them.  The latest is the fifth in the naval series and will probably be called Bog Hammer.  Once more it will be about an episode in recent military history and once again illuminate a 'war' that most of us have forgotten about.  In this case the Tanker War in the Gulf prior to the first Gulf War.  The period it covers is one of the most turbulent of the late last century with not only the Middle East a complete mess but with the advent of Glasnost - the consequent collapse of the Soviet Union.  It might seem a done thing now but at the time no one was sure where it was all going to go.

Some photos of 2013:

 

 A snowy star to the year with my sister and husband in Austria

 My twiddleyumpteenth birthday (thanks kids)

 

 

The good boat Amelie May was commissioned by the little Amelie May just after her new sister arrived.

 

 

We took five months to travel 550 miles from Manchester to London. Oxford and Bath

 

 

And the grandkids just kept on growing.

 

 

I wonder what 2014 will bring.