Sunglasses.  Essential in this strength of light but a bit of a pain on a boat, especially if you need prescription lenses for distance and reading.  You need distance so that you can see where you are going, keep a look out for other boats, lobster pots, fish farms, rocks and so on.  You need a reading pair for looking at the charts and writing in the log.  You have to take the sunglasses off when you go below and swop them for the reading glasses and vice versa when you come back up into the light.  You need them to stay on when you are looking down working on the winches and looking up checking the sails and, if they do fall off, you need them to stay attached to you otherwise they go straight over the side because that is what happens on a boat.  Drop something six feet from the edge and it will roll, bounce or otherwise make it’s way rapidly into the sea to be lost forever.

Nothing too tricky here then; all that is needed is a cord to hold them on.  Indeed.  Except, adjustable cords bounce on the back of your neck and your back in a most irritating way when you are wearing a swimming costume (never a problem when wearing a shirt of course but who wants to do that in this heat?) and the sports variety with a tight strap is irritating when you need to take them off quickly and gets sticky on your face.  We have tried various combinations of tightness and looseness, tucking the loose bit of the strap into the tight bit and so on.  All sort of works for a while but fails sooner or later.

And then David and Susan arrive; put their sunglasses on and... they have solved the problem with the niftiest purchase ever from an outdoor shop.  Maybe this is old news to you and you have already seen these gadgets but I got seriously excited about them.  So much so that David and Susan left them for us and we are now happy, happy, happy in our sunglasses.  We take them off, we put them on, we hang them round our necks, we push them up onto our hair.  All is easy and there is no annoying dangly bit bouncing around at the back.  Bliss.