Boat Show Weekend 2014

First thing Saturday morning, the Bosun and I headed down to the Excel Exhibition Centre in London Docklands for a visit to the London International Boat Show

Glen was on a mission to find a comfortable lifejacket whilst I had a number of targets to research.

My primary goal was to sort myself out with a really decent set of sailing footwear. Too often my enjoyment of a sail has been adversely affected, and even on a couple of occasions ruined, by cold and/or wet feet. Enough is enough and I decided whatever the cost to get a really good pair of boots.

My secondary mission was to research safety gear. I wanted to look at alternatives to pyro flares. We've got a set of expired flares with no easy way to dispose of them and I'm relucatant to spend a three figure sum replacing them with more of the same only to have the same problem in three years time.

With DSC on the VHF we already have the red distress button which arguably makes the parachute flares obsolete. How to make the hand held flares equally redundant was my quest. The red (night time) and orange smoke (day time) hand held flares are primarly intended to guide rescue assets to your location. What might be available to do that job better I wondered?

The two products I was most interested in were the Odeo Laser Flare and PLBs (personal locator beacons). Had a look at both but I wasn't sufficiently convinced at the time to make a purchase. I've still got some thinking to do and no doubt I'll return to this topic another day

Meanwhile Glen immediately collared an assistant on the Marine Superstore stand and tried on and chose to buy a Kru lifejacket with integral hood plus an add-on light. I stood waiting for an assistant to come free in the boot and shoe section only to be ignored by the staff and even elbowed out of the way by rude and impatient queue jumpers

That cost them any chance of a sale! Over to the Piplers of Poole stand and a lovely young lady couldn't have been more helpful. She cheerfully assisted with digging through stacks of boxes to find the right size of Orca Bay boots, which I'd nearly bought sight unseen on-line before the show, and showed no annoyance at all when I decided I didn't like them. In the end, it came down to just £30 more to buy a pair of Dubarry Ultima boots which are generally recognised as being the best of the best (if perhaps a little posh for my usual image!)

So, job done, we set off towards Fambridge via a service station snack lunch on the outskirts of Romford. The A12 was slow going for quite some way but we made it in the end.

Good food and quite a lot of good beer followed that evening and we were fairly late to bed. As a result we were fairly late to rise the following morning!

Bacon butties and copious coffee energised us to pack up and put the boat to bed. I really think I managed to remember everything this time! By lunch time we were on the road home.

It'll be several weeks now before we're back on board.