Dear Friends and Crew,

Hope you are all well and had a great year? We did at 'Sailing Ventures' being on the water most weeks cruising or racing and experiencing many weekends of extreme weather either very light winds or extremely blustery!

This year has included more RYA practical and shorebased week and weekend courses at all levels including Day Skipper, Yachtmaster . Coastal/Offshore exams, ICC certification and several First Aid and VHF courses. There was also cross Channel trips to Cherbourg and the Channel Isles. We have also been out a few times with various owners doing own boat tuition to achieve a variety of objectives and have again sailed on some lovely yachts.

Carol is keeping up her reputation of ensuring SV students go home with extra weight on! Her tasty victualling assumes bellies need to be full if potentially facing the high seas or even just another few hours in the classroom. Funnily enough, nobody contradicts her concept as you all seem quite happy to come back for more! All dietary needs are happily catered for!

On the racing front in May 2011, Martin was skippering a yacht for a week's Mediterranean racing in Turkey in the ECC 2011 event which started in Orhanye and finished in Marmaris. They had a great week racing between different towns, villages and parties! The SV team also managed a couple of the Thursday evening races around the cans in the Western Solent. SV also entered the Round the Island race with a great crew including Kaz Aston who has MS. Check out Kaz's website www.kazaston.com. The SV team of Trudy, Hugh, Ken, Stephen and Martin also competed in the RORC Channel qualifying races for the Rolex Fastnet race where they had a great race, coming 45 in class and 188 overall out of 314 starters. They had a couple of hiccups on the way but the great team got it sorted in a couple of hours and continued racing.

We were also at the Southampton Boat Show in September and it was good to see so many of you and we hope to be there again in 2012 with some more interesting show offers.

Flame had the hull completely scraped and repainted this year along with some special attention to the rudder so she now has a very smooth bottom! We will be working on the yacht through the winter, whilst still in the water, until beginning of February with the usual winter refit tasks.

The SV 2012 programme includes shorebased courses in Hordle, including intensive Day Skipper & Coastal Skipper as well as short one day First Aid, VHF Radio and Radar, along with more cruising out of Lymington. We will be entering a SV team in the Round the Island Race again this year on 30 June, so give us a call if you are interested? We are now taking bookings for 2012 with the first available date currently being 7th January for shorebased and 10th Feb for practical.

If you have any suggestions to improve our website let us know? We would love to hear from you anyway so let us know what you are doing and drop us a line. Look forward to sailing with you, meeting up on the water or just having a chat.

Safe sailing