There is not a sailor in the world who does not recognise the craggy, conical peak of Cape Horn. It is, like it or not, the ultimate sailing goal, the…
Dick Durham
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Sailing though the British winter with the Little Ship Club
And then there was light, most welcome it was, too after a gruelling drive via several motorways into the pitch black New Forest. I drove on, motivated by the thought…
Is Britain really a maritime nation?
Many years ago, I was on a family motoring holiday driving towards Brittany when, in a small town, we passed under a banner proclaiming a regatta. I was baffled: we…
How to lay your own mooring
Over the years I have had deep water moorings laid for me and also dug in my own half-tide moorings. Both have been in positions which suited the craft I…
In search of the famed ship Beagle, which carried Charles Darwin to his discoveries
For several years I kept my Contessa 32, Minstrel Boy, at Paglesham on the River Roach in Essex and was a member of the Roach Cruising Association (RCA), one of…
Don’t cross the Dover Strait. It’s thick with traffic out there
Forty years ago this summer I made my first Channel crossing according to an old, delaminating, mildewed and fading logbook. It is the first logbook I ever kept because prior…
‘Everyone will miss Don, but few will miss his copy’ – Remembering a sailing writing legend
There’s a scene in the film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where outlaws Paul Newman and Robert Redford watch from a crag as the distant posse chases them. To…
Don’t let Thames sewage kill off this ancient oyster fishing boat
Samuel Pepys mentions oysters in his diaries 68 times, but that was when they were as common as winkles along the banks of the Thames and when they were a…
‘The best thing about a concrete boat? The worst ones are at the bottom of the sea’
Circumnavigator, Rob Hart, poked the glowing embers of his coal stove, set a cup of tea in front of me and said: ‘You know the best thing about a concrete…
‘Why a healthy dose of fatalism is good for you’ – Dick Durham
Nancy, my mother, drummed into me a set of lower middle-class rules, the origins and the validity of which remain, a lifetime later, lost to comprehension. Yet still I stick…