There are great pilot guides written by the likes of Doyle and constantly updated online resources like Noonsite, noforeignland and Navily to help visiting yacht skippers navigate the complex Caribbean…
Learning curve
Hurricane Ivan’s aftermath: The cost of a Caribbean storm
[STORY UPDATED 11/12/2025] Correction: Yachting Monthly would like to apologise to Spice Island Marine for the original version of this article which misquoted them and their employees and consequently misrepresented…
The pitfalls and pleasure of owning my classic yacht
The motor launch headed towards us at speed across Chichester Harbour and then pulled up sharply alongside. ‘Can I just say,’ said a rather posh sounding man, ‘she’s a thing…
‘Our dinghy outboard was being smashed to pieces by the swell’
Our dinghy is the equivalent of everyone’s car at home; it’s how we get from our boat at anchor, to anywhere in the harbour. Used most days, it has to…
‘I spent hours in the water in hurricane conditions’
When we saw the race briefing it was a little bit fuzzy,’ John Quinn told me, recalling events that had happened over three decades earlier, before the start of the…
‘The salty water was dangerously reaching the cockpit edge and we had to prevent the boat from taking too much water’
I first saw the boat after reading a small advertisement in a local newspaper. It was lying under a red tarpaulin. The varnish was faded, the boat was full of…
‘Sometimes your boat knows best’
Zen Again was heading west for Africa. We had departed our home port of Fremantle, Western Australia in June. We visited Shark Bay, Cocos-Keeling Islands, Rodriquez, Mauritius and Reunion. Now…
‘Never before have I sailed in such wild weather’ – struck by a ‘weather bomb’ near New Zealand
Sammy, my sister, was ready to go. She couldn’t wait to put on her skipper’s hat and head off on a great adventure. It was 1998 when offshore sailing was…
‘While we were out consuming the local delicacies, a stowaway was surreptitiously finding their way aboard’
Rat in Mi Kitchen, one of the greats by UB40, proved to have a whole new meaning when sailing in Greece this year. A rodent infestation was far from my…
How to learn to sail: Catching the sailing wave
When I signed up to improve my sailing knowledge via an RYA Competent Crew course, I didn’t realise it would involve gasping at fins breaking through the water. As I…