Southampton Boat Show

We spent two days at the Southampton Boat show, with Oyster, on other blue water cruising boats and with suppliers - exhausting but so much fun!

Celebrating our new boat in the sun at Southampton Boatshow - is this a dream???

Made the decision to change the table on our boat to this fold out version as seen on the 575

Oyster have a brokerage show at the same time - a great opportunity to see features we like and don't like.

Love this idea to remove the spare halyards from cluttering the mast

Feeling at home on the 575 - hope he's not getting foot disease

The serious side - picked out a liferaft at the Ocean Safety stand

We love the new chunky steps and stainless hand rails - we will have something similar....

Shoosh don't tell anyone but I had to test the bed for size - this is a 575 but I think its the same size

The first decision made

The first choice we had to make was to decide on the colour of our 'cove line and boot tops' - these are the lines that on the hull just above the water line and down the side; the go faster stripes. Oyster standard is navy blue, however we wanted something different and so decided on grey, dark grey but trying to find the right shade was quite a dilemma. Some greys are green grey - yuck, others are too pale. At one point we walked every jetty at Fremantle Sailing Club looking for boats with lines in a grey we liked. In the end we short listed to 3 RAL colours and Oyster made sample panels in gelcoat over fibreglass and shipped them to us so we could see exactly how it would look. We finally decided on RAL7024....

I really hope we will be better at making decisions as this process goes on as that decision took two months.