Stephen Ladd is a city planner from the US who opted for a better life. Not being inclined to luxury, his first book goes under the title Three Years in…
Great Seamanship
Roving Commissions extract: Calm in the Storm
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…
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…
Into the Southern Ocean – navigating by sextant in the south
Rudyard Kipling famously wrote that the complete person can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. Most books of the sea end with some…
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…
Taking the Helm: Tales of leading a Whitbread team
The Whitbread Round the World race/Volvo Ocean Race has a precedent for replacing skippers in Uruguay and Taking the Helm, recounts what happened after one such moment. Skip Novak took…
London light, a tale of working on the barges
Anybody who has successfully worked an 85ft, 120-ton Thames sailing barge up and down the estuary and East Coast waters, under 4,000 square feet of canvas with only a mate…
Scandinavia to the Big Apple: lessons learnt from a cruising couple’s adventure
Carsten and Vinni Breuning are a modern cruising couple. Like many who make the leap – and the many more who aspire to – they went to sea in retirement…
Across the Atlantic in a £1500 ferrocement schooner
Of all the yachting books I have read, not one starts like The Boat They Laughed At, by the inimitable Max Liberson: ‘I tapped the large man on the shoulder,…
Great seamanship: Scarborough to Brightlingsea
The Edwardian period of English yachting is best remembered for the great cutters and schooners of the racing scene. From Cowes to the Clyde professionally crewed yachts competed for big-money…
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…