Soup, sparklers, photos, cock-ups and cats

 Well, my entry to the Ventnor Marina Moorers Association annual photo exhibition didn't win. I know!  Shock horror!

 I resisted the temptation to don a bison horned hat and storm the marina office holding a Stop the Steal placard, mainly because I didn't think my picture was good enough anyway.  I'd like to show you the winning photo but as it's not mine I can't.  For the record, here's the one I entered (guided by your comments - thanks).

Association members cast their votes and the winner got a framed print of his/her picture.  Apparently five people tied for third place and I wasn't even one of them, so you may rightfully refer to me as Also Ran.  One of the third place pictures was of a beautiful Turneresque sunrise over the marina and featuring Herbie in the foreground.  I wanted that one to win.  We are going to contact the person who took it and ask if we can use the picture, so hopefully I'll be able to show it to you.

Still it was a jolly evening and we all had home made soup and mulled wine and waved our sparklers to show what big kids we all are (although I suspect the average age of the 34 people who attended was north of 60 years old).

Here's Kath in sparkling form

and yours truly demonstrating my rodeo skills.

So we're on Herbie for a couple of days.  Surprisingly we're warmer here than we are at home.  Our house thermostat is set to 17.5 degrees these days in order to save the planet for you.  On the boat I dare say our use of fossil fuels is not so praiseworthy.

Now here's an interesting thing.  We're booked in for a boat safety inspection on 14th November, and today I got a phone call from the examiner Mike Allen to say that on the BSS database, we're down as not needing one until 2024.  Well I checked back over our records and we were last tested in 2018 so we should be due now.  Mike duly checked back and confirmed that we were indeed certified in 2018 so presumably a certificate for someone else's boat  in 2020 has been wrongly attributed to Herbie.  He's going to phone BSS office tomorrow and put them straight.

Meanwhile we're off to Cambridge to visit Charlie, our Peter's new kitten who likes to watch old episodes of Mythbusters on TV.