Not for the first time, the Royal Cruising Club’s wonderful annual journal Roving Commissions has turned up a jewel of seamanship. Delving into the 2021 edition I found an account…
Tom Cunliffe
Penelope Down East – essays in singlehanded sailing
I was involved in a discussion the other day about the essence of seamanship. A number of folk were taking part and we had much of what you’d expect; tales…
An Arctic adventure: ice-bound in Spitsbergen
Andrzej Jankowski, better known as Captain Andy, is a one-off. I met him in Warsaw when I was launching a book of my own, translated into Polish. His book’s title,…
Letters from the Lost Soul extract
The author of Letters from the Lost Soul Robert B Lipkin (better known as Bob Bitchin) has certainly done his time in deep water and shoal, much of it in…
Great seamanship: Taken by the wind
Mike Jacker is a retired orthopaedic surgeon living in Illinois. Among many other activities he still sails his boat, now mainly on Lake Michigan, but he has a long memory.…
I married an Explorer extract: exploring the far north
Today, the auxiliary schooner Bowdoin operates under the flag of the Maine Maritime Academy, making training runs to Labrador and Greenland. Launched in 1921, the 66-ton Bowdoin was the brainchild…
Great Seamanship: Where the Trade Winds Blow
Lou Boudreau shipped out of Nova Scotia in the 1950s at five months old in the 98ft schooner Doubloon. His father, Captain Walter Boudreau, was one of the pioneers of…
A race for real sailors: giant schooners go head to head
America’s Cup yachts had become so extreme by 1920 that they didn’t race in anything more serious than a moderate breeze, but the racing designs of the day were not…
Trapped upside down in the North Sea
John Passmore is a man unafraid to move with the times. A professional journalist with a distinguished newspaper career, he now hosts a powerful online presence in the guise of…
London to Stockholm on an 87ft houseboat: An extract from Sailing Barge Venta
Back in the 1960s when the last Thames sailing barges were coming out of trading, a few were taken by bold individuals as yachts or houseboats. The best of them…
C. Sherman Hoyt memoirs: A typically frank extract from Yankee Yachtsman
Born in 1878, C Sherman Hoyt sailed in every racing yacht imaginable for the best part of 60 years. Tireless, highly skilled, with an almost uncanny ability to spot a…
Sailing with humpback whales: An amazing extract from Orca by John A Pennington
It’s far too easy for a retired ocean sailor like me who served his time 40 years ago in a freer, simpler world, to imagine that the age of high…
How (not) to set up a wind vane: An extract from Tom Fisher’s Arctic Smoke blog
Like me, you may have followed with interest the stories about failed self-steering wind vanes that emerged from the last Golden Globe Race. My own experience of a Windpilot Pacific…
Extract from Sailing through Russia: From the Arctic to the Black Sea
When the Great Seamanship series was planned back in 2004 it was about giant waves, dismastings, amazing rescues and the like. Research, however, led me into a wonderland of nautical…
Storm sailing in a 16ft open boat: Extract from The Sea Takes No Prisoners
I’m always delighted to find a book about high adventure undertaken with no sponsorship and nothing out of the ordinary in way of funds. The Sea Takes No Prisoners, recently…
Learning the ropes: An extract from Shakedown Cruise by Nigel Calder
Nigel Calder’s works on the technicalities of boat systems are accepted worldwide as Bibles, but he doesn’t generally trumpet his vast cruising experience. He is a modest man, so when…
Sailing Cape Horn on Pelagic: An extract from Rounding the Horn by Dallas Murphy
‘Rounding the Horn – Being a story of Williwaws and Windjammers, Drake, Darwin, Murdered Missionaries and Naked Natives – a deck’s eye view of Cape Horn’. So reads the front…
Solo Caribbean sailing: Trevor Robertson on 38ft Diva’s memorable maiden voyage
“In 2017-18, sailed from New Zealand to the Antarctic Peninsula by way of Cape Horn (60 days). Spent three weeks pottering around old haunts in the Peninsula then north to…
Inside a legendary Whitbread: Extract from Maiden by Tracy Edwards and Tim Madge
Tracy raises the funds, finds the boat of the same name and skippers the first all-female crew around the globe in the world’s greatest fully-crewed yacht race. The years 1989/90…
Sailing around the world in an 18ft boat: Extract from Australia The Hard Way
Our Great Seamanship series tells stories of supremely difficult epic voyages, interspersed with tales of the humdrum that excel by virtue of being beautifully written. Australia The Hard Way by…