All site content
© East Coast Sailing:
Colin Jarman, Garth Cooper, Dick Holness, Roger Gaspar. All Rights Reserved

Have your say here on any East Coast boating topic, whether it’s about something that has caught your eye on the ECS website or in East Coast Sailing magazine. Just click onto the Contact page and send us your message. We look forward to hearing from you.

Keep it up!

Keith Carter
Just to let you know that I am enjoying ECS magazine and have introduced a friend to the site recently. Please keep up the good work.


Thanks Keith, I’m glad you like the magazine - we’ll do our best to keep it all going, but to do so we need people like you to ‘spread the word’ to friends and acquaintances. As readership builds, so our chances of obtaining a few advertisements grow, which in turn would help a lot with our costs.   CJ


Reading ECS

Tony Lavelle
I love your magazine but I feel compelled to give you some feedback. The content is great but I just can’t read it on screen because it involves too much scrolling. On my computer (and rural bandwidth) it’s jerky and slow with delayed response.


The essential scroll bars seem to be displayed wrongly. What should be the moveable part (the ‘thumb’) is grey and the immoveable bit is highlighted. This is the opposite way round and confuses me every time.


The format looks like it was designed for paper, with text in columns and portrait shaped pages. My computer screen is landscape format. To make the type big enough to read I have to zoom in, then scroll up and down repeatedly to follow the text.


I haven’t tried the PDF version as that would probably have the same problems. The only solution is to print it out, but I hate the waste and cost. Or I could buy I bl**dy great screen so the text is big enough to read without scrolling.


I designed software (and latterly interactive websites) for 20 years, so I hope my feedback will help you consider how to rectify this unfortunate problem.


Tony, at least you are trying to read ECS!


May I suggest that you download the mag rather than trying to read it on line? That would solve your bandwidth problem and 'jerkiness'. Alternatively, there is the PDF version available.


I don't know where the scroll bars are that you are having trouble with, but it's not a problem I've seen. Has anyone else?


The magazine is indeed designed as though it were a paper one and Yudu is used as the primary delivery system in order to maintain that look and feel as closely as possible. To design the magazine for a landscape shaped page would create just as many problems - I know, I’ve tried reading one like that. Zooming in and out is a customary requirement these days, from smartphones (I'm told) to car satnavs and boat chart plotters. Provided you can easily reach a full overview, it shouldn't deter you.


If you fancy volunteering your software expertise, we could probably use it!    CJ


Reading ECS - 2
Colin McEwen
Just downloaded and scanned the new edition, looks to be well up to it's usual high standard. Particularly liked the review of your new boat.


That cockpit tent looks promising as mine is on it's last legs, to re-cover it (frame in situ), £1500!!


One minor grizzle, the iPad adaptation now means that it displays two pages at a time, both in portrait and landscape mode, while the old version gave one full screen page which in portrait is, in my opinion, easier to read.


Still it's stopped raining, might go for a sail.


Fair winds.


Glad you liked the magazine, Colin, but it seems I can’t win with formatting the PDF to suit iPad users - some want what I’ve done, so they can view double page spreads and see photos right across, and some, like you, prefer the reduced amount of zooming needed to read offered by single pages, even if you lose the benefit of seeing full spreads. Is there a majority feeling about this? By the way, my boat might make a good tender for the Jeanneau!   CJ


Timbre!
Chris McCartney
Well done for the April issue, very interesting - trip to London, Buxey aircraft... - and above all the 'Timbre' afticle. I read it and was about to look on the internet to buy (would make good washboards, because paint falls off as they shrink and grow depending on weather, then saw you can grow in 'planks' and remembered the date :-)...


Timbre improvement?
Martin Ashton
Re Timbre article - typical of so many technology developments: we use it to mimic existing processes, i.e. boat building, instead of doing the complete job. We should be injecting boat DNA into the saplings and growing boats directly. Happy April!


I understand that the inventors did think about this, but were already in line to alienate all of the plywood producing countries (which includes Russia), the global GRP industry (and thereby the petro-chemical industry), so they wisely chose to maintain the good faith and support of the remaining craftsmen able to build wooden boats. I think they probably got the balance right.    RG