Welcome To The Howarths.Net

Glenys and I have had a few adventures in our life - skydiving, sailing, mountaineering, skiing, scuba diving, horse riding - we've tried most things.

In 2011, we sold our house in the UK and moved onto our sailing yacht "Alba".  For the following 8 years, we slowly meandered our way around the world, completing our circumnavigation in 2019.  The Alba Chronicles is a daily diary of our voyage and The Glencora Diaries is a diary of another four year voyage back in the 1990's, cruising with children in the Mediterranean and Caribbean. 

Glenys has created The Galley Slave - an on-line cookbook showing some of her favourite recipes from around the world. A link to our most recent photographs can be in our Gallery page.  We're keen divers and have created an Underwater Photos section where you can see some of our photographs of sea-life from around the world.

Clicking on any photograph will display an enlargement, clicking on an anchorage name will display the location of the anchorage in Google Maps and we've even created links to various creatures that we've photographed along the way - so if you don't know what a Peacock Mantis looks like, you can now find out.

 

Update Oct 2019, Alba has now been sold and we have adapted to living ashore - Glenys has taken up horse riding and Neville is now a keen glider pilot.

Anambas Islands 2016

Last Updated:   6 September 2016

1.  INTRODUCTION
These notes are a result of a 2 month cruise in the Anambas Islands in July and August 2016 on “Alba” our Hallberg Rassy 42F.  Our draft is 2.0 metres (6’ 8”). Some of the time we were accompanied by “Amulet” (USA) and “Sea Monkey” (AUS).  We visited over 50 anchorages and only met 4 other boats in our time in the area.

May 2018 - Annapolis, USA

1 May 2019   Norfolk to Herrington Harbour North, Virginia (Day 2)
Dawn was a cold, grey affair with low clouds and a light mist, but at least the wind picked up enough to sail again.  We arrived at the entrance channel into Herrington Harbour North at 08:30.  It’s very shallow on the approaches, especially in the very narrow dredged channel into the marina itself – we came in at low tide and saw 2.1 metres at a couple of places.

Glencora Prologue

It all started in 1990, when we finally gave up skydiving.

For the previous fifteen years, Glenys and I had spent all of our weekends and holidays going skydiving.  Now we were the proud parents of two children - Brett aged two years and Craig aged two months.  Airfields and the skydiving lifestyle don’t mix well with children. So we gave up skydiving. Just like that.

Mountaineering

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I wondered what I could do to mark the momentous occasion. It came to me one evening while I was staring into a glass of Merlot - climb the Matterhorn. Now I'd done a little bit of rock climbing on crags in the Peak District with Glenys and our children, but nothing in the way of scaling mountains. I hadn't even done much hiking since I was in the Boys Scouts.

Hiking for Cruisers

Sailing takes you to some out of the way places where it's interesting to hike, but there are no detailed maps and we've found that if you ask the locals, they look at you blankly before asking "Why do you want to do that?" If you manage to get any information, it tends to be vague and you are left to your own sense of direction to reach the objective.

Galley Slave

Imagine cooking a meal in a space slightly smaller than your downstairs loo. The sink is half its normal size,  there are only 2 rings on the cooker, and the working surface doubles up as the lid of a top-opening fridge. Add to that the fact that anything you put down on the work surface may shake, rattle, or roll, and you may wonder how it is possible to produce anything remotely edible!

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