Midsummer sailing
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

Eve & I are off for a weekend trip during the “Juhannus” midsummer long weekend. This old sailing ship overtook us on the way.

Training for the race
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

Tuomas & I have taken Kittiwake out for a “shake-down” cruise in preparation for tomorrow’s race. Everything seems ready, so now we’re motoring back in in the evening calm.

Tea at the Castle Tea Rooms, Bude
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

Eve & I are out shopping and just generally walking around in my old home town of Bude, Cornwall. It’s warm and sunny, and we’re not looking forward to returning to chilly Finland (-1 C today, we’re told).

Team board games
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

Some of my team from work got together at our place to play board games. Here we’re playing ‘6 Nimmt’ (Take 6).

Herrankukkaro
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

We’re on a team-building trip at Herrankukkaro in the Turku archipelago.

Kimmo with the S&W 500S Revolver
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

Yesterday was Kimmo’s birthday, and to celebrate he’d arranged that we’d go to a shooting range and fire some guns. We started with firing 50 rounds each with a Glock 9mm pistol at 50 metres range. Then Kimmo got a special surprise – his friend at the range let him fire one shot with the Smith & Wesson 500S revolver, which fires .50 magnum bullets, i.e. half an inch in diameter. Think Dirty Harry, except this was the next size up. Even with our ear protectors, it was very loud – it felt like a firework had gone off next to us.

Finally, we each got a chance to fire a full magazine of bullets from a ‘Suomi’ sub-machine gun, an almost legendary Finnish gun from the second world war. It was surprisingly stable – long bursts tended to drift upwards, but short ‘squirts’ of 3-5 bullets stayed very much on target.

Naturally we kept score: with the Glocks, we counted the points properly; with the Suomi, we just counted how many bullets were inside the outer ring. The results:

So with the pistols, I got more than the other two combined :-). I think I gloated a little too much…

We recorded videos of the Suomi firing:

• Kimmo firing the Suomi sub-machine gun
• Mike firing the Suomi sub-machine gun
• David firing the Suomi sub-machine gun

Afterwards we went to Black Door to tally our scores and have a couple of beers. James joined us there – next time, I think he’ll be coming along to try out the guns.

This was my first time ever firing a gun, and I didn’t expect to enjoy it so much – it’s not really my thing. But actually holding and firing the gun felt no more scary than using a powerful electric drill, and it was fascinating to try and hold the gun steady to get the bullets on target. It didn’t hurt that I did better than I expected :-).

Eve & I have recently been looking for a new flat – one with the bedroom facing away from the street (or at least to a quiet street), and with a second bedroom to use as my study. Although we love living in Kallio the flats there tend to be one-bedroom or studio flats, and hence most of the flats we visit are in the more expensive Töölö area. Today we saw some nice flats, naturally just above what we’d agreed was our upper price limit. We’ve some thinking to do.

As usual with these Töölö trips, we included a visit to one of our favourite pubs, Vastarannan Kiiski (the name is a humourous Finnish phrase: a ‘kiiski’ is a ruff, a type of small fish, and ‘vastarannan kiiski’ literally means ‘ruff at the opposite shore’, but actually means one of those people who always takes the opposite viewpoint). This pub is one of a chain of very nice pubs which specialize in having a very wide range of beers from different countries. Here’s the list of bottled beers:

Bottled beer list

They also have a dozen or so beers on tap, and currently an American week with another 19 American small-brewery beers:

American beers

Yes, we all know the joke about American beers, but that refers to the mass-market beers like ‘Bud’. If you get a chance to try these small-brewery beers, don’t miss it!

Marzipan
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

This year’s Christmas cake is now covered in marzipan (home made, of course). Before Saturday evening I still have to add two layers of white royal icing, then some kind of decoration (I usually use coloured marzipan shapes, I’m no good at decorating with icing).

"That one’s an H-boat, and that, and that, …"
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

I walked to Caf̩ Carusel in Kaivopuisto for lunch today, and took this photo of the boats out of the water for the winter. The white boat second from right, with a patchy blue keel and no cover, is an H-boat, the same as our own Kittiwake. And so is the white boat two left of that, and the blue boat left of that, and the white boat two more to the left Рyou can recognize them by the graceful continuous shallow curve of the bow.

There were five more H-boats further along the line: H-boats are the most common type of keelboat in Finland. Eve used to get quite sick of me pointing them out as we walked past the yacht harbour in the summer: “That one’s an H-boat, and that, and that, …”. I never thought that we would have one too.

Kittiwake at Rajasaari
Originally uploaded by Greygriffin.

Winter is coming, and in Helsinki it’s time to lift all the boats out of the water so they won’t get damaged by the ice. On Saturday we lifted out Kittiwake (more precisely, a large crane-lorry lifted her out), and she’s now sitting on her metal frame waiting for next year. We still have to build a wooden frame along her deck to support the plastic sheet which will keep off the snow.

The bottom looks so scruffy because it has been cleaned professionally with a pressure-hose. It was a very impressive device with its own petrol engine, and it stripped off the season’s small barnacles with ease. It also took off all the loose bottom paint, revealing several different colours from previous seasons. The light blue paint this year was totally unsuited to the boat’s above-water colour scheme, and next year we’ll be using red paint (like the much bigger boat behind Kittiwake).