Off to Kos this year

Snowing again today. We had hoped to ski Mont Vallon but it really is no fun in the fog. Once again, almost everybody we met was either part of a ski school, or a brit. Any sensible person who had driven here would head for home. But we are on a skiing holiday, and so we are going skiing! We saw at least one family shouting at the children that they should be enjoying themselves….The last day of a ski holiday is always a great time for doing stupid things and injuring yourself,  but we try and avoid this particular trap.

After lunch we skied over to La Tania in the hope of finding some different tree line skiing. After the usual getting lost in the fog we eventually found a great run, and then there was a sunny interval… just the one, for about 10 minutes.

You can just see in this picture the layers of cloud. We would start a run in clear, then ski down into the cloud, then after a while out of the bottom into clear again.
Another feature of skiing these runs in the trees is they have little side tracks which shoot off into the trees for 10m or so and then reappear onto the main run, usually over a jump. The best way to check these out is to watch which ones the ski instructors take their groups down. If there are none of these around then the other method is to send your father down first…..
We had great fun  charging through all the soft snow with occasional diversions into the trees, and actually covered our greatest distance of any day. We have skied a total of 217km over 6 days.
I leave you for now with a picture we found in the restaurant we visited this evening. I’m not sure if you will be able to read the poem… but it is rather appropriate.

Today dawned bright and sunny, so we headed over to La Masse. This is as far to the other side of the piste map as you can get from where we were in Courchevel 1650 earlier in the week, 9 miles as the crow flies (we’ve not seen any crows mind you). We had not been over to this area for at least 15 years! Lots more people about today, pretty much the only people inflicting snow and fog on their children yesterday were the Brits, who like us figure out that as they only get to do this 6 days a year and are paying for it anyway they are going skiing come what may….

The view from the top of La Masse is impressive, you can see all of Val Thorens and Les Menuires. And there in the background is Mont Blanc (about a third of the way from the left hand end).

This is a great place to ski, from top to bottom about 4km in a single run with a drop of 1100m. We had lunch at the top, where we took the panorama above, and then skied the black run down from the top. Not too many bumps but really steep.

We headed for the fun parks above Menuires, they have the “boarder cross” runs we talked about last year, but also small jumps to learn on, and “rails” and “boxes”. We watched a few ski groups go down with instructors and then “dropped in” to “try a few moves”.

http://youtu.be/xDA9lyiCpxY

http://youtu.be/6iBo-QTuh_E

As you can see the “Backside double McTwist” needs work…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXEZ-qZ49R8

An excellent days skiing.

Today was overcast again with some snow. So we stayed below the tree line but still got some good skiing in.

In the evening there was an organised (well as organised as they get around here) event. It included the usual collection of people wandering around wondering what was happening, a torchlit descent and a demonstration by the safety services. The torchlit descent uses LEDs these days, rather than the actual dangerous flaming things they used last time we did one of these…

By far the most interesting piece of the rescue display was how they get people down from the lifts in the very rare occurrences that they stop and cannot be restarted. Although this almost never happens in practice, they have to train for when it does. They stopped a gondola above our heads, and showed how they get someone down the cable to it, and winch down the occupants. In this case one of the occupants was one of their rescue dogs!

The next demonstration was of avalanche rescue. They had buried someone in a huge pile of snow (would this happen in any other country?) and first of all searched for him using the latest clever electronics… no result. Then they demonstrated the traditional method of using long poles, until finally, the star of the show, the rescue dog, reappeared and dug out the (we assume willing) volunteer!

Finally a demonstration by the Piste bashers… those things that rid of all the troublesome bumps overnight. You don’t want to get this close when they are working….

All in all an entertaining and impressive display… finished off with some fireworks.

Hoping for better weather tomorrow!

Another fine morning. With no overnight snow there was no delay in the lifts opening so we headed over to Val Thoren. I have tried mounting my camera on the side of my helmet, and I have a small remote control for it, so I can just press a button to take a picture or video of whatever I am looking at. So here we are going up the lift to the point where we can ski over to Val Thorens.

It was a perfect day for skiing between resorts so it was quite busy going  over the top.

All the bumps from the day before had been “bashed” down by the machines overnight , so we had perfect snow to ski on. The Waffle cafe (see last years blog) is alive and well. Val Thoren is and odd place, where the lifts andthe ski runs are all mixed up with Luxury appartment buildings.

Towards the end of the day it clouded over a little, and more bumps started to form as more and more people skied on the snow. The smallest member of our party really does not like these bumps, so we finished at a sensible time.

It continued to snow overnight but the by dawn the weather had got its act together and gone into postcard mode,

Frustratingly the overnight snow needed avalanche blasting and so the high lifts stayed closed until 11am. This meant we were confined to the valley with everybody else for an hour and a half and it got a bit crowded. Lift queues were pretty frustrating.

Still they only slow you down for 15 minutes and the truth is I am not fit enough to ski all day without these enforced rests anyway! The other interesting thing about this shot is that almost everyone is wearing a helmet. Helmets for kids have been standard issue for a long time,  but 5 years ago I think only 50% ocf the adults in this shot would have been wearing them.  The odd thing is that the scientific proof of the benefits of them for normal skiing is decidedly unproven. I have a bad feeling that one of the reasons they are so popular is that people listen to music.  I heard a guy in a different queue explaining to someone that his speakers had cost him more than the helmet….. These days you have to ski assuming most people are in a world of there own….

Anyway a fine days skiing,  although all the fresh snow created more moguls than we would normally like. We headed to Courchavel 1650 and returned via a coffee at the top of saulire.  A cafe with a view to rival pretty much anywhere in the world.

We probably over cooked it, the run home from here was hard work on tired legs. We got lots of video during the day, but as we were late back I have not sorted through it yet….

Well we are back again for another ski trip. With what probably counts as a serious lack of imagination we are in exactly the same apartment as last year! Having left the UK in a massive rainstorm and negotiated a few fallen trees to get to the train we awoke the first morning to…. A snowstorm!
It has been snowing heavily all day, here is the view from our balcony when we returned. The higher lifts opened late as they were avalanche blasting.

It is not at all cold, and so this snow is wet. As we experienced last year it will be great once we can see it, we have probably got 40cm of fresh snow, but skiing while it is falling is a right pain, and on the first day when you are finding your balance it is even worse. In the odd moments you could see it the fresh powder at the side of the runs was great fun, although it did lead to the best faceplant I have done in years.
This year we are trying some new helmets with built in Visors, rather than wearing goggles, They seem to do a better job of not steaming up than goggles, they go over glasses and and you can just slide them up when you walk into a cafe.

Most importantly they provide endless opportunities for gratuitous Top Gun quotes….

With all this wet snow, despite all our waterproof gear we were getting pretty damp, so we had a reasonably short days skiing the full details captured on our rinky dinky app…

Sorting through all the pictures there were a few that didn’t make it into the blog that I really should share.

Firstly a picture of the infamous jellyfish. These are at least as difficult to photograph as you would expect… I did this on a different camera and despite a bag full of cables and adapters I didn’t quite  have the bits I needed to get it onto the blog until I got home…

The West Coast of Paxos has some truly stunning cliffs and caves. You get a feel for the size of these things when you compare them to a similar yacht that has gone close in… Look for the white dot at the foot of the cliffs….The other amazing thing is they seem to keep going straight down below the water level. Even close in the depth sounder was telling us we were still in over 30 metres of water.

With any breeze or swell this would not be a good idea at all.

And finally some video. Firstly some taken in Emerald Bay… Watch out for the Jellyfish in the distance.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBsOQTeLRPc]

And finally some from the afternoon we spent anchored off an Island called Vidho

[youtube=http://youtu.be/cJ2qjTS77Vg]

Morning in Corfu town. Not a cloud in the sky as usual.

Today was an end of season race, so we took Knight Odyssey and Knight Star around to the marina where we moored up Knight Odyssey and dropped off the elements of the crew that didn’t want to race before piling everybody else onto Knight Star.
We spent the rest of the morning practicing tacking and hoisting and dropping sails, until we decided that was far too serious and had lunch.

After not such a good start just as the wind died we made our way up through the fleet. The wind did it’s usual trick of dying and then coming back from a different direction several times but with a crew of 7 we had enough people to setup the boat each time. We had a near disaster when the gas ran out so we couldn’t make any more tea…. but we had spare cold beer and eventually we made it to the finish. Here is the finish line. Because of the handicap system we would not know how we had done until later…..

There is a massive party at the end of the day and a prizegiving, and we were very pleased to find we had come second of the large flotilla boats. We even beat the owner of the company who came third (remember the massive yacht from a couple of day ago).

Our prize was a bottle of wine and a shirt..

Celebrations continued quite late so this blog post is a bit later than normal.

Another fine weeks sailing rounded off in style.