Friday’s dinner topic in late September, 2022: ‘I don’t want to go to French school. I don’t even speak French.’ ‘You will make friends,’ I argued, but the hoped for…
Cruising life
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…
‘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…
‘Navigating infancy makes rock pilotage and tidal calculation look like a stroll in the park’ – Libby Purves
I applaud the idea of families with small children trying out what cruising would be like with them as crew. One of the many things never mentioned in National Childbirth…
Sailing Around Norway’s South Cape
This is what Thor-Erik had meant. ‘When you sail past Cape Lindesnes, you go from one world to another,’ he had said when we had moored alongside his boat in…
‘Why I went over to the dark side’ – Pete Goss
Falling off a ladder teaches you many things. For a start the NHS treats a one-metre fall as serious, so my fall, from above first-floor level, should have had spectacular…
Isles of Scilly Storm Dodging: ‘We had to gain steerage way from a standing start while neighbouring boats were dancing around wildly’
Mary and I are very fond of the Isles of Scilly. In fact, we regard the archipelago as the most delightful cruising destination to be found anywhere around the British…
‘If someone had offered me a third of the asking price to buy the boat back, I would have bitten their hand off’ – Monty Halls
I sat back on the saloon roof, leaned against the mast, sipped my beer, and revelled in the moment. Here I was, at long last, perched on my very own…
‘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…
Sailing the Orkneys: ‘Bryan saw a tall black fin breaking the water, followed by another – it was a pair of orcas’
Sitting on my living-room floor surrounded by tide tables, pilot books, and almanacs, one part of my upcoming voyage around Britain began to excite me more than the rest. I…