Happy Birthday Mark!

Mark is our project manager – he has been fantastic throughout the building of the marina and has definitely been instrumental in keeping me sane over the last 9 months (despite offering to pay Mick the site manager to throw me in the marina!)

The sun is still shining and it feels like it's ages since we had any rain which isn't good for all my grass seeds, so apologies everyone but I'm praying for rain (maybe just a little bit – throughout the night!) One thing we have noticed during the last 6 days is how amazing the sky looks without all the contrails (those are the vapour trails you get out of the back of aircraft) They tend to spread out and form high altitude clouds.

When I was at the universty some of my colleagues used to get very excited about studying the effects of these (they need to get out more!) Anyway, aside from the academic stuff, due to the ash cloud we have had a mention on the Audlem website twice this week, well at least our spoof flying boat service has. You may or may not be aware that on the 1st April the Audlem website published a story about the marina offering a new flying boat service to enable moorers to vist Audlem more easily (as well as other far flung destinations such as Nantwich Lakes). This has caused much amusement and also much interest with at least 2 people turning up to the marina to view the fictional plane and expressing a degree of disappointment (and also a little embarassment) when they discovered it was a spoof (sorry!) More amusingly at least one local newspaper called me up to ask if they could run a story on it and it took some really strong hints at the date of the story before they finally twigged!!!
Oh, and while we're talking about the ash cloud – I have offered to run a flotilla of narrowboats down to the south coast, across the Channel and down the French canal system to pick up stranded tourists – anyone volunteering???