I would be delighted if you could join me at any time between 3pm and 7pm this coming Friday (January 4th) for an “In The Bleak Midwinter” New Year celebration “open house” (or, more correctly, “open boat”) aboard Tiptoe Too on berth W18 in Chichester Marina. Mulled wine, hot apple cider and festive nibbles will be on offer, with double rations for anybody who arrives by boat! If the saloon fills up we’ll spill out into the cockpit, and if that fills up too we’ll spill over on to the pontoon!

Apologies for the shortish notice of this but you’ll appreciate that because some of us may temporarily be outside we have to have a window of decent weather, and it looks as if Friday should fit the bill. It might be chilly, but at least with a developing high it looks dry...

For those arriving by car, once you’ve driven over the first four road humps in the marina driveway and passed the security hut on the left, you need to turn right and go through the barrier to the north side of the marina. Chichester Marina now has a groovy new electronic access tag system for getting through that northside access barrier, and I will be asking the marina staff to be ready to let folks through if they call the marina office on 01243 512731 and say they’re coming to visit Tiptoe Too on W18. If you have any problems call my mobile on 07714 432420 and I’ll dispatch someone with a tag to let you in!

Park on the grass verge opposite the lifted-out boats on their cradles close to W pontoon.

An RSVP by e-mail to graham.ellison@btinternet.com would be appreciated to let me know some idea of numbers, but nobody will be turned away for lack of one!

I hope to see you on Friday!

Kind regards

Graham Ellison

Chichester Marina are asking that anyone attending either goes to the marina office (it's manned all the time) to be issued with a temporary access disc, or parks in the one of the south side car parks and walks round to W pontoon. If you want to pick up a disc, the marina office is in the lock building right at the far end of the marina. Here's a map (click on the map to enlarge it):

http://www.premiermarinas.com/p...ina_boatyard_west_sussex 

When using the disc, hold it over the rectangular outline on the disc-reader box (top right hand corner seems to work best for me).

Hope to see as many as possible tonight!

Graham

Thanks to you and family for hosting Rascal, Sophia and Vol-au-vent last Friday. I'd not experienced a Christmas/New Year on-board celebration before and thoroughly enjoyed it. Apart from enjoying the mulled wine, hot apple cider and countless bites to eat, it was good to see Tiptoe Too illuminated and decorated in Christmas fashion [:)].

Appreciatively yours,

Ken

Ken Surplice

Commodore

After the initial flurry there was a brief quiet spell, but it wasn't long before a crowd of assorted regular crew and sailing friends and relatives descended on us. All just about managed to squeeze around the saloon table and put the world to rights - suffused with the external glow of the oil lamp and the internal glow of the mulled stuff!

A full report for the newsletter will be forthcoming in due course, but suffice to say that we enjoyed it so much that we hope to make it a regular occurrence. As I said on Friday evening, there are a number of lessons to be learned - things we'd do slightly differently - but all in all we feel it was good fun and we look forward to "In The Bleak Midwinter 2013/14"!

Best regards

Graham