It has been a busy summer for Sailing Scenes. In among our regatta coverage we have been supplying the yachting press with pictures, words or both. We took the shot on the cover of September’s Yachting Monthly that related to our eight-page test inside on the new Bavaria C50. Practical Boat Owner’s September cover was by Sailing Scenes too, and our photos were splashed around inside across a couple of features. A photo of a very different nature made another double-page spread in September’s Yachts and Yachting – a group of Flying Fifteens at full stretch on a spinnaker reach.
In and on the October issues we had PBO’s cover – a shot of a Jeanneau we took in south Brittany a few years ago – and a double-page spread leading into a selection of photos from our extensive library of cruising yachts. More of our cruising yachts made it into October’s Yachting Monthly and it was something different again for Yachting World, in the form of an eight-page test of the Contest 85 that we sailed in Italy back in the early summer. That was the one that followed a phone call out of the blue on a Thursday afternoon asking what we were doing ‘early next week’ and whether we could pop over to Punta Ala to sail the 85-footer (one Polina Star IV) owned by the chap whose previous boat had been lost in a high-profile incident a few years ago. So that made an interesting and intensive rocket-trip to Tuscany, where we lived in a very different world for 36 hours.
Moving on to the November issues we have a very pretty boat on the cover of PBO and many more (of varying degrees of prettiness) inside. Yachting Monthly in November has another of our boat tests, this time on the Coast 250 – the trailable power-sailer that motors at 15 knots and also sails very nicely. We had to go to Wales and bounce around on the Teifi estuary to put that one through its paces. If you want to know why it has succeeded where so many others have failed, you’ll need to read the November YM, further on in which you will find a series of our photos illustrating a feature on a yachtmaster course written by one half of a well-known couple of racing sailors with whom we spent a damp and not-very-breezy day on the Solent.
So that was our autumn flurry – autumn in terms of publication dates – which made for a busy summer of travelling, writing and photographing. More features and photos might be appearing in the not-too-distant future. Be it testing an 85-footer in Italy, a 50-footer on the Solent or a 25-footer in Wales, or supplying photos of racing keelboats or production cruising yachts from 30 years ago, it’s all in a day’s work for Sailing Scenes.
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