I’ve posted a couple photos of Old Harry Rocks (Google Maps, Wikipedia) in the past, usually from quite a distance, and those photos always look a bit like this:
Old Harry Rocks with a super low tide
Category: Life the universe and everything
Shameless plug of Simply Pilates, Poole
Check out Simply Pilates in Poole, UK. Kirsten is a very experienced Pilates instructor and offers a range of classes, from small group sessions to one-on-one instruction, all designed to fit your needs and goals.
Wales August 2024
I found it impossible to not have a boat picture first. This is the view from Conway Castle.
The First Autumn Easterly
Swanage, Dorset, UK
Swanage
Kayak Fishing
Wind over tide at Peveril Point
There was a great if not rather extreme example of wind over tide today at Peveril Point, Dorset today.
Wind over tide creates choppy conditions, more so on a tidal race. Check out the rush of water over the ledge and almost standing waves.
February 2019
I did quite a bit of work travel in the first weeks of February including a stopover on Holbox in Mexico. The Hobie Cat in the beach garden was tantalising, sadly unseaworthy amidst that beautiful environment with nice even onshore winds.
And this past week back in the UK I did a RYA Dinghy Instructor course (yep, passed 🙂 ). We were super lucky with the weather which was mild and apart from one day had enough of wind.
Photo credits Gill Richards
The DI course week was pretty intense with very packed days and homework in the evening. It feels a meaningful qualification to me, you can’t fake time on the water and sailing experience.
Apart from learning to teach sailing itself, the RYA instruction methods are excellent with much attention being paid to different learning styles, session planning, communications, feedback and everything else that goes into teaching effectively.
Not to mention learning new sailing and power boat skills, a lot on safety, protection of children and vulnerable adults, organising your training fleet and conducting sessions on land or water. All good stuff and also a nice consolidation of my own sailing skills where more advanced manoeuvres need to be at demo level and work every time.
As always, especially with sailing there is so much still to learn (it’s endless) and this stage still feels like the beginning. I’m grateful to Swanage Sailing Club for sponsoring the course and our great instructor during the week and coach/assessor on the final day.
If you’re in the UK and want to learn to sail check out the RYA website. It’s a great scheme to learn with, consistent in method across the country and you might be surprised to find a training centre not too far from where you are be it sea, river or lake.
Shell Bay 25th December 2018
These little birds are members of the sandpiper family and called sanderlings. We saw them on a visit to Shell bay (Dorset, UK).
They run along the shoreline at speed avoiding the waves, seem to like standing on one leg and even hop along at speed on one leg.
More views from Shell Bay.
I never tire of looking at the sea regardless of the weather. 🙂
How to create a fancy Apache directory index listing with .htaccess
Sometimes you don’t need a CMS and want to keep things as simple as possible. For my use case I wanted sailing club race officers to be able to upload Sailwave race results and display them in the most simple way possible.
To achieve that and ensure isolation from the website’s WordPress CMS I added a subdomain and configured a pretty Apache directory listing. Users now just upload files via FTP.
Assuming your website is running on the Apache web server, you can achieve the same with .htaccess and few tweaks.
See above example here, see the code which you can easily alter to suit on github.
More about this the Apache docs:
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_autoindex.html

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/howto/htaccess.html
Klaus Harris 