We are Penny and Colin - we've shared boats for the last 40 years. Before that I was a windsurfer. Colin got his first rowing boat as a teenager, raced dinghies off Southend-on-Sea and then went onto the dark side and had a series of motor boats until I came along and convinced him to return to sail.
While starting the business back in 1983 we bought whatever boat we could afford - which wasn't a lot. Hence the 12 ft Skipper, followed by a lovely wooden G.P. 14, a Topper for the kids, a Laser mainly for Colin. Amongst those we bought our first cruising boat - a plywood 17 foot Lysander with bilge keels which made it very interesting to tow and launch.
Since then we've had a twin-keeled Sadler 29 on the East Coast of the UK, a Rival 41 and now a Solaris Sunrise 36
catamaran in the West Country.
We do as much of the work on the boat(s) as time and skills permit. In particular, we've run our software business from the boat ever since the Internet became a requirement. That has meant WiFi systems and now we have a distributed wireless network with 4G backhaul via a
Raspberry Pi.
This
winter's software project is to add sensors to both engines (temp, revs) and integrate them with the
SignalK system which already provides navigation (
OpenCPN), battery/charging monitoring, log and wind. These feeds are visible across the network - phone, tablet, laptop and we're adding a waterproof 10" tablet (or maybe 2) at the helm.