A new design for Herbie's name

 Following my signwriting course I've not only been practising brushwork at home but also thinking about repainting Herbie's name on the side of the boat.  From all the hundreds of typefaces /styles/fonts (call them what you will) available which one should I choose?  Well I haven't decided but over the winter I'll experiment with a few, drawing them up more or less full size.  The one below use three sheets of A3.  The first one of these uses Bookman Old Style font . I might have a go actually painting a couple of letters, maybe E and R, from it to see how hard it is. I'm still not all that good with brush control and this time I'm not using masking tape except maybe for top and bottom edges. 

Apologies for my shadow there and that it's a bit faint - it's just pencil. Perhaps I'll go over it with a black felt tip pen.   Here's a closer look at a part of it.

I quite like its chunkiness compared with what is on Herbie at the moment. I just noticed that I had omitted the blocking on the outside top half of the R. Doh!  

I was never happy with the letters E on the current one. Notice on the pencil one I have the 'blocking' on the right whereas on the boat I did it on the left. I think I prefer the right. The 'new' one also has deeper blocking.  

On the course, Joby Carter told us we'll never look at letters the same way again.  He was dead right; everywhere I go I'm looking at the detail of lettering.

As I try other styles I'll post them here in case anyone has an opinion to share.

A bit too much afloat

 Major problems at Cropredy Marina yesterday thanks to storm Bert.  The moorers' facebook group was showing alarming pictures of flooding all round the marina and in the village too. I don't think I can show them here because they are not my pictures. 

 The staff have been out slackening everyone's ropes to prevent the boats from being pulled over as the water rose so high. Now I read that there have been a lot of electrical problems because of shore line plugs being submerged.  I dare say that applies to ours.  There's not much we can do as we are at home where we've had some rain but not a lot.  We have to be so grateful to the marina staff who have worked through the night with the help of some resident moorers to attend to the safety of some 300 boats.  However they've found the time to keep us updated by regular emails.  We'll be going back to the boat in a couple of weeks so we'll see then if Herbie has been affected in any way.

On top of the boat issues the flooding has hit the facilities buildings and various bits are out of action and of course the car park has been under water.  The access road to the marina looked like a river.

I really can't understand why so many people deny the climate change science.  I would have thought it would be obvious by now that it's really happening.  I know there have always been floods, but not at the frequency they are coming nowadays.  I sue to have a dream of having a house by the river. I don't think I'd want one now.

Job's a Good'un

 The restoration of Herbie's hinged aft hatch lid is complete, no thanks to me. All the thanks go to my mate Rick who has lovingly and skilfully turned this

into this

Not a simple job because he had to cut away the old rotten plywood without damaging the 1mm thin fibreglass exterior wrapping and replace it with good solid hardwood, butting the new wood accurately against the remaining good old stuff. See where the old white bits meet thenew  brown bits at the side edges.

Tricky when working up against the outer skin.  I could never have done it so well. It'll see me out now, that's for sure. Future owners will appreciate the work wonder who RCB is

The hatch cover was originally made by Herbie's prevoius owner Roy, whose wife Val found the usual sliding type of hatch difficult so he came up with the hinged ideaI with built in props to hold it open, rather like the gas struts on a car boot. It's always been a good hatch cover, solid, (actually surprisingly heavy), secure and rainproof, but plywood always de-laminates eventually. The hatch has now had a good exterior repaint too so to do it justice I really have to work hard next spring when Kath and I are going to do a lot of Herbie's exterior paintwork which if you recall, we started earlier this year.

Thanks again Rick, you're a star!