The cloud and snow returned today. This is probably the best snow we have seen in 25 years of skiing, but some of the worst weather as well. Having said that, in 25 years we have never had a single day when we couldn’t ski, which I suspect is pretty good going.

Anyway we skied over to La Tania. These place names will make no sense to most people, so here, belatedly is a map.

You can get the full map at http://ski-area.meribel.net/fileadmin/RM/Plan_des_pistes/plan_3vallees.pdf

La Tania was built as a new resort when the winter Olympics was in France back in 1992. The lift system does not seem to have been touched since then, which is slightly crazy. It is set up for families but only connected to the rest of the ski area by quite a tricky run, one more lift and it would be transformed. By contrast St Martin, a similar small satellite resort in the other valley has had its lifts completely replaced over the same period.

For the last run of the day we came back to our own valley and visited the “Moon Park”. Each of the resorts now has its own “park”, an area of snow shaped by the grooming machines into “whoops” jumps and all kinds of other things I don’t known the right terms for. Certain of the more suicidal members of the party like these places….  A new feature for this year is a system where you swipe your electronic lift pass at the start, then it videos you as you go down (one for clear days this) and then sends the video to your mobile so you can bore your mates to death with it that evening. We couldn’t quite be bothered to stand in the freezing cold trying to figure out the instructions so here is our own video. These bumps (sorry Whoops) are sooo much bigger than they look in this.

http://youtu.be/HU-2WUUqQUE&rel=0

This blog post was delayed by the author going down with the bug that has troubled the other members of the party this week, and therefore spending the evening running a temperature, moaning, and generally lying about on the sofa getting in the way whilst everybody else packed. Normal service will be resumed just as soon as we figure out what normal is…. Oh and there was a problem with the sledging video that has now been fixed, so if you are interested go back to yesterdays post and you should now see all of it. It turns out that uploading HD videos over the resort WiFi is a bit flaky…. funny that.

There is of course no such thing as a bad day’s skiing, just some where you can’t see as well as others, and some where you feel a bit secondhand at the end. So we will sign off with some skiing up high in the sunshine.

http://youtu.be/o8CjsILg-ws&rel=0

Thanks for reading

Today we skied over to Val Thorens, although we learned from a couple of teenagers on a chair lift yesterday that it is not cool to call it Val Thorens, it is now known as “VT”… in fact even uncool  may no longer be the right thing to say… oh what eves

Anyway, Val Thorens was once and (maybe still is) the highest ski resort in Europe, giving it perfect snow conditions, but limited architectural merit. As well as the great skiing the other reason to ski over there is the waffles. This is a cafe we discovered what must be very nearly 20 years ago, serving freshly cooked waffles, and here it still is.

It occurs to me that this is truly remarkable. Most of the busy lifts in the 3 valleys have been upgraded since we first came here, anything that was slow and had queues has been replaced by state of the art 6 man express chairs, the last of the old gondolas of any significance will go this summer. We are not talking trivial changes here, these lifts cost 5 to 10 mllion Euro a go. Skiing as a sport has changed hugely in that time, but the cafes and restaurants up on the mountains have hardly changed, there are a few new ones, and this one in particular has been extended, but most of the ones we knew are still there… with the same menus! Why would that be?

Anyway, back to the waffles. As you can see a healthy lunch with no UK calories and 4 portions of fresh fruit…..

Val Thorens has more than its fair share of the latest trends, it seems that every bar and cafe now has to have music, but bizarrely enough this one had a band playing “Hotel California” and similar vintage. Oh it has a sushi bar as well.

Back to the quasi normal world of Meribel there was floodlit sledging organized this evening. Normally we are here in school holidays but this year our half term does not line up with French (or most of the UK for that matter) holidays and so it is slightly quieter than previous year. This also means there are slightly less evening activities laid on, but the sledging has to be done….

This year they were lending out “snake sledges” which are individual plastic tray sledges clipped together with a hinged joint, so two or more people try and steer it down the slope. Luckily the helmet cam was on hand….

http://youtu.be/ZxLux2GIh_Y&rel=0

Anyway, another fun day…..

last day skiing tomorrow…..

This is more like it.

Sunshine with the odd cloud wandering around. After several days of snow there is a lot of fresh powder easily accessible at the sides of the pistes, and we even found a few sections that were completely untouched to ski in. This kind of snow requires a completely different technique, which I doubt I will ever master, but I can at least embarrass my children by trying.

We skied mainly in the Belleville valley above Les Menuires and St Martin de Belleville, the sunshine on the tops, usually above any clouds was great.  Mainly for Richard’s benefit here is an HD video of Jerusalem – top to bottom in 5 minutes at a maximum speed of 30.8 mph (according to GPS). Have I mentioned the sunshine?

http://youtu.be/-NuRPiRcGIY&rel=0

If you are reading this on Wednesday evening it might not have finished uploading… internet connectivity is not stunning here.

All in all a fine day’s skiing

Our apartment is privately owned, the local agency we rent it from describes it using some agency speak that means “could do with a bit of a refurb” however it has the overwhelming advantage of location. You could ski into the locker room (stopping and opening the door is very much recommended), and within about 100m we have a ski hire shop (of the more helpful variety), a brilliant restaurant that also does takeaway pizza, and a supermarket. This does rotisserie chickens, a brilliant concept if you can a) think ahead enough to order one and b) speak French. Of course I can do neither of these things… but someone in the party can, so this evening we ordered one of these instead of eating out. I resisted the temptation to photograph it…

We decided to head over to Courchevel 1850 today, in what turned out to be variable weather. It provides some great skiing, but is equally renowned for being the place to be seen in your designer, fur trimmed ski outfits. Luckily some of our gear is now so old it has passed through “old skool” and is now officially “retro” so we like to think we fit right in!

This place is absolutely not renowned for good value lunch stops, we turned up at Les Verdons, a restaurant half way up the mountain and they asked us if we had a reservation… funnily enough, no… but they found us table anyway (no doubt with the chic retro skiwear they assumed we were celebrities they did not recognise).

Apparently it is not the done thing to photograph your food in posh restaurants.

But this salad seemed worthy of breaking etiquette.

In the afternoon the group split into two. Those of us who thought that skiing in a cloud at 9000 feet was a good idea, and those sensible enough to spot the fact that this was unlikely to be very pleasant.

Further experimentation with our new video camera, we have now tried it chest mounted, helmet mounted, and so we decided to try boot mounting. This gives a much better impression of speed.

http://youtu.be/dx_dtI-_ZfQ&rel=0

Skiing in this kind of variable snow when you can’t see clearly absolutely kills your legs, you are constantly having to adjust your balance. This is why it is a good idea to get fit before going on a skiing holiday… it is just a shame I always remember that when I get here!

Feeling 47 miles of stiff legs…..

The forecast for tomorrow is for sun, sun, sun. Let’s hope this one is as accurate as the previous ones.

Sadly, the weather forecast was correct. We woke to find it snowing steadily. Snow is good of course, once it is nice and flat on the ground, but on the way down it is annoying.  Two of the crew were  suffering the remains of a cold so decided to sit out skiing today. You can see the sense in this when you consider this was the typical view through my visor for most of the day.

Our skiing nearly went hideously wrong before we even started. We had skied down to the gondola and as I picked up one of my skis I noticed something odd. One of the 2 pins that hold the binding plate (and thus me) to the ski was half out, the retaining screw had sheared. This would have been interesting if I had not spotted it! We trudged up to the nearest ski shop and after much gallic sucking of teeth and ” ‘ow long ‘ave you had deese” it turned out that I was “very lucky” and they did have a replacement pin. After further searching of the shop for the appropriate tools the replacement pin was fitted, and the cost was negotiated down to “worth at least 2 large beers” so we settled on 10 euro.

So finally we got to do some skiing…. Top of Saulire to the bottom…

Then back to the apartment for lunch and to see how the others were getting on.

In the afternoon we stayed below the treeline. The problem with falling snow being that it flattens the light and makes it impossible to see any contours, this means you have to ski by feel, rather than being able to actually see which way the ground is sloping. As it was snowing, there were lots of lovely piles of soft snow building up (which of course you can’t see) which become ever more annoying. If you are skiing runs cut through the trees then they create shadows, which mean you can see the contours a bit. There are two nice tree lined runs nearby, so we played on those for the afternoon.

43 miles of not seeing where you are going is enough fun for one day.

Forecast for the rest of the week is much better!

Our apartment is right by the piste. Here is the view from our balcony

As you can see. No shortage of snow.
As predicted, it was cold…. -18degC kind of cold. We did some limited testing with our new gopro chest mounted camera… here is Sarah skiing.

We have lots of handy video of me peering into the lens saying …”is it on” and some of people trying to put skis on. Will try harder tommorrow!

Luckily we have lots of other technology cluttering up my rucksack, so I have an app that can tell you all about our ski runs after our afternoon coffee stop ( we went over to St Martin de Belleville). Here you go.

Now isn’t that helpfull?

All in all relaxing days skiing sticking to the easy stuff… still cold, and snowing by the end of the day.

Now which of these gadgets can get me a weather forecast……

We are going Skiing in Meribel soon. A blog of our adventures will appear here.

Today dawned bright and sunny, with not much wind… this was the theme of the weather for the day….

In the morning we had a play witn the cruising chute…a type of asymetric spinnaker made of light cloth to go fast downwind in light winds… just because really…..

The afternoon was the end of season race… a truly insane startline with far too many boats far to close together.

Once again we worked hard all afternoon in order to fail to win a prize of any kind….. except we did manage to beat Knight Odyssey’s indentical twin, Knight Star, which was being helmed by one of the flotilla company’s instructors…….

The wind died and not many boats actually crossed the finish line. We stayed out far too late and motored into the marina in darkness…. quick change and off to the end of season party, which is still in full swing as I type this, but we have a flight to catch in the morning.

This brings to an end an awesome week of sailing. Some interesting weather, but we had loads of fun, and, just like every other time I have stepped on a boat, we learned a lot before we stepped off again. A bad day on the water is better than a good day anywhere else.

Until next season.

The skipper.

A brilliant days sailing, which needed an early start as we had 30 miles to cover. We needed to get to our final destination this evening, as tommorrow is the end of season race.

We headed for Corfu in light southerly winds, with some gentle swell in the open sea between the islands, which disappeared once we were into the Corfu channel, between Corfu Island and the mainland. The wind died at lunchtime, so we motored for 30 minutes while we had lunch, then it returned, a little stronger than last time and now from a little North of west. This meant we had to sail close hauled, with some short tacks to reach our destination, Gouvia Marina, North of Corfu town.

With winds between 10 and 16 knots we had Knight Odysseys full sails up for the first time, sailing at up to 6 knots in almost perfect weather.

Knight Odyssey uses traditional slab reefing, we can hoist the main sail fully, or reduce it by three different amounts. In the picture above you can see the different coloured ropes that control this. The red rope is for serious winds (it has seen lots of use this week) it pulls the sail down to fold up all the cloth below it, leaving not much above it, with amber and green ropes below it that reduce the sail progressively less. We are probably carrying 5 times the sail we were on Sunday!

By the time we got to Gouvia it was nearly dark, otherwise you would have a picture of the hundreds of boats moored around us, we have acomplished our goal of bringing the boat to it’s winter home…..

Tommorrow is the race….