About Anjea

This website is a live sailing log and photo archive built to capture passages, refits, weather notes, and stories from aboard.

Anjea was launched in 2006. She is a van de Stadt “Norman” design built in aluminium. She was a fast boat when I bought her, but I have added rather a lot of “essential” cruising gear, and I keep thinking of more things I need every year. The weight makes a difference but I’m happy going a bit slower.

As I write this we (Anjea and I) are half way around. There are no fixed goals but I guess it makes sense to complete the circle one day and return to Hobart.

Many people have joined us along the way. Some just for a coastal passage and some have stayed to cross oceans, but I have never sailed with crew I didn’t love. Thank you one and all.

Technical

This site is powered by Astro content collections, with slog entries and image galleries organized more-or-less chronologically.

I use my Samsung SM-G990E phone for many images. But when I need some exercise I carry the Nikon D700 and a bunch of lenses. I used to use Photoshop but have grown to hate all Adobe products with a passion and so am intending to find a replacement, preferably one that will run on Ubuntu with KDE.

Tracks are recorded from GPS while underway by OpenCPN and converted from GPX to geojson format by a little utility I wrote. Unfortunately, tracks for many voyages were lost because of a disk failure. Where tracks were missing I have reconstructed them from memory. The rest of the track is derived from actual GPS positions.

The Track page is a Mapbox component fed with data uploaded from OpenCPN. OpenCPN is running pretty much all the time we’re sailing so it’s a reasonable on-board cache for track points. Every so often I upload the track to the website. At some later date, if I install StarLink, I might get it to update the position directly from the GPS feed.

I looked at several website generators and liked none of them. The old website was on Orchard Version 1, a rather ancient, clunky and excruciatingly slow web solution. I considered replacing it with Substack and relying on something like PredictWind for tracking. But I really wanted to be able to implement my own tracking page, and I liked the idea of closely integrating a gallery with the text. I found nothing that would do that. So I started looking at website frameworks that would at least make it easier to generate my own site. I looked at Astro early on, then spent some time with Hugo. I looked at Svelte but it is overkill for my needs, and then I went back and looked at Astro again and the closer I looked the more I liked it. I worked thru some of the tutorials to get a feel for it and then just plunged in with the help of AI.

Most of the site was vibe-coded in May 2026 using vsCode and Claude Sonnet 4.6 over about a week. I had never used Astro before, which says a lot for the toolchain: Linux, KDE Desktop, Claude Code via VS Code, Mapbox, and Astro with the public site hosted on Netlify. Many other free or open-source products were used along the way. My thanks and admiration go to everyone who contributes to this amazing ecosystem 🙏

A Side-note on Prompting

Claude seems to me to have a great knowledge of patterns, modules, components, APIs and how to apply them. The most general advice I can give is to take advantage of that and ‘stay high!’

I found that it was best to break tasks up into high-level logical mental ‘modules’ such as:

Build a basic website for a sailing blog
with a gallery, a Track page and an 
About page. Put a menu at the top with 
links to the Blog, Gallery, Track and 
About pages.

It will do what you ask but it will be plain and minimal. Then you modify that as needed:

Make the background a warmer color.

Right-align the menu.

Left-align the content.

and so on…

You can even ask it to do very general changes such as:

Make the site suitable for phone, tablet 
and desktop displays.

It knows what patterns to apply and how to integrate them with the architecture. If you don’t like the breakpoints or whatever then it’s easy to adjust them once the pattern is in place.

I learned not to be too specific too early. If I started to get overly specific with an exact font-size or spacing it tended to go balls-up. It would do what I said but other things would then break. So stay general (stay high) as far as possible and let the AI look after the details.

Sometimes the AI gets a twist in its knickers and does breakful things. Install a good repository system like Github and use it to roll back when you need to.

I enjoyed building this site largely because I didn’t have to worry about the details, except when it came down to very specific things such as the Track page, and then I equally enjoyed the freedom to get down amongst the weeds. So if you want to try something similar then ‘stay high’ to get high fast.