As I write, sitting in my bunk watching the sun set over the estuary, its 8 15 pm on New Years Eve. Traditionally a time of good wishes to all, a time for making resolutions about what will or will not be happening next year, a time for family and friends and a time for reflection.
To be sure its only another marker on an artificial calendar, but it’s a useful marker, one that is close to the longest day of the year where I live and the shortest where a lot of my friends live. It’s a time when we get holiday breaks, some of which have theist backgrounds, some that are pagan but its still the end of year break.
Its also a time when advice tends to be handed out, much of which causes me to look at the advisor and think, you should take your own advice buddy and if you did you’d be better off than you are, but occasionally there is a gem.
Heres one that I heard yesterday.
“When making New Years Resolutions, don’t make ones you know damn well you wont keep, don’t make ones that you know are beyond your ability, but try making one, and ones enough, that is well within your capacity to achieve, and work on it until its done. You’ll get a lot of satisfaction from that, whereas to vow and fail just reinforces a defeatist position.”
That’s good advice, a bit wordy though. I’d put it thus--- “Get yourself a mouthful of lifes good things, but don’t bite off more than you can chew”.
All the very best to everyone for 2016.
John Welsford.
André Mauric was the most prolific and best known of Frances 20th century yacht designers. His career started in the 1920s with radical designs for racing yachts to the International Metre Rule in the days when the bermudan rig was still considered new-fangled and fragile, and carried on well into the 1980s when, among other winners he designed the the highly successful Atlantic crossing record breaker Kriter VIII. In between he designed dozens of great boats, including Pen Duick VI for Eric Tabarly, the 1972 Half Ton Cup winner Impensable, the popular and successful First 30, and Sylphe, a classic yacht hidden for 5 years underwater.
After the war Sylphe was recovered and completed. Her long submersion had done no harm – indeed it may have further improved the seasoning of her timbers and made them less liable to distort, crack, or split in later age. She was finally launched in 1947, and though Mauric had designed her with one of his trademark tall bermudan cutter rigs supported on a slender mast, her sailplan was modified in 1953 to give her a larger and taller foretriangle, its foot extended by a short bowsprit. These modifications were no doubt intended to keep her competitive with the latest offshore racing boats which, encouraged by the allowances in the old RORC rating rule, had begun to sport big overlapping genoas and high aspect mainsails. 
Her new Dutch owners sailed her to Turkey and set about a 7-month total overhaul to make her more suitable for Mediterranean charter use. Although the interior had mostly to be stripped out and rebuilt to provide more comfortable charter accommodation, the original hull timbers and planking, having endured such a long submersion so many years ago, were found to be in excellent order. Only a couple of rot-infected frames had to be replaced. Her owners are proud to claim that Sylphe still has none of the steel bracing and reinforcement that many other yachts of her day now need to keep them in sailing order. They are equally proud that she retains her original mast winches and her unique, custom made, cockpit sheet winches. 
