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…
Dick durham
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…
‘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…
Dick Durham Podcast July 2017
Hundreds of yachtsmen in the Thames are set to sail past a ticking time-bomb from the Second World War this season, says Dick Durham
Dick Durham Podcast June 2017
Do you feel unwelcome in your own yacht club? Maybe the rogue blazers and their beloved regulations have taken over, says Dick Durham
Dick Durham Podcast May 2017
Biscay or bust, 44 years after a disastrously ill-fated attempt, Dick Durham finally makes the fabled crossing
Dick Durham Podcast April 2017
Britain’s last sailing ship can be manoeuvred singlehanded without an engine, so why does she need one now?