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…
Great Seamanship
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…
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…
Cruising Patagonia: An extract from Winter in Fireland by Nicholas Coghlan
Nicholas Coghlan circumnavigated in the late 1980s with Jenny, his wife, on their small yacht, Tarka the Otter, before taking up a career in the Canadian Foreign Service. Many years…
Finishing a solo circumnavigation: An extract from Solitaire Spirit by Les Powles
If he hadn’t chosen to write a book, Les Powles could well have remained one of the unsung heroes of the ocean, men and women who dare to do in…
Sailing the Southern Ocean in a 27ft boat: Extract from Captain Bungle’s Odyssey
Captain Bungle’s Odyssey by Paddy Macklin is a great sailing book belied by its humble title. Extraordinarily self-effacing, Paddy makes light of a remarkable circumnavigation executed in truly Corinthian spirit,…
OSTAR 2017: David Southwood recounts an exceptionally brutal Atlantic storm
Competitors in the 2017 Original Single-handed Transatlantic Race (OSTAR) experienced the worst conditions since the race was initiated in 1960 in the era of Blondie Hasler and Francis Chichester. This…