the salty road to freedom
~ pilot cutters to high-performance cruisers,
journalism, books, film ~
and the sea…
I’ve been Mate on a coasting merchant ship and run yachts for gentlemen. I’ve operated charter boats, delivered all sorts of vessels, raced at quite high levels and have been teaching sailing intermittently for thirty-plus years. I became a Yachtmaster Examiner in 1978.
Classics have been my passion and for forty years I owned wooden gaffers. My wife Roz and I have sailed them all over the Atlantic, from southern Brazil to Iceland and from the Caribbean to Russia, with a number of trips to the US and Canada thrown in. I love traditional craft, but now I’ve finally gone bermudan. I’m happy sailing anything though that does the job properly. I’ve no time for boats that go sideways.
Summersdale, the publisher of travel books, including one of my own (‘Good Vibrations’), have just sent me their reprint of Sir Francis Chichester’s ‘The Lonely Sea and the Sky’. I remember reading this many years ago, but it encouraged me to have a another look, especially since in the interim I’d had the chance to fly in a Gypsy Moth. Well worth picking it up again if you haven’t done so for a while.
more...If you run out of plotting sheets in mid-ocean and are struggling to work out your lat/long scales, don’t be tempted to try and plot on the ‘big’ chart.
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