Meet the team
Profiles of our editorial team
Paul Gelder - Editor & Features Editor
After more than 20 years in weekly newspapers, as reporter, film critic and finally editor, Paul gave up his deskbound job looking for new adventures with Yachting Monthly.
Four months after joining in 1990, he volunteered for his first blue water passage, sailing from the Azores to Plymouth. Two years later he crewed on the first 5,000-mile leg of the British Steel Challenge, to Rio de Janeiro, and subsequently wrote a book, InterSpray's race around the World.
He has also written The Loneliest Race, about the 1994-95 BOC Challenge Solo Round the World Yacht Race, Total Loss, a collection of lessons learned the hard way, and Gipsy Moth IV: A legend sails again, documenting the project he inspired, to free Chichester's famous yacht from the Greenwich concrete.
Paul came to sailing late, in 1982, aboard a Cape Cod catboat, followed by a 20ft Robert Tucker Princess. He currently sails a Telstar trimaran.
Rob Peake - Deputy Editor
Yachting Monthly's deputy editor is Rob Peake (37), a keen cruising sailor who has many years' experience as a journalist on newspapers and magazines, including our sister publication Motor Boat & Yachting, where he was also deputy editor.
Rob has cruised extensively around the British Isles, the North Atlantic, Mediterranean and Baltic. Much of his sailing has been in the Solent, but in recent years he has been enjoying the East Coast, where he sails a Moody 34 Marionette, from Suffolk Yacht Harbour on the River Orwell.
Rob also crewed on the 72ft Isle of Man on an 8,000-mile, five-week passage from Boston, America, to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in Chay Blyth's BT Global Challenge in 2000-2001. He has owned a series of dinghies and lives on a 72ft Dutch barge, berthed near Kingston on the River Thames.
Contact Rob
Chris Beeson - Assistant Editor
Since learning to sail in Malaysia 30 years ago, Chris Beeson has logged over 30,000 ocean miles under his keel, cruising, racing and delivering in the Channel, the North, Irish, Caribbean, Baltic, Mediterranean and South China Seas, and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
He's sailed most boats, from Lasers to J Class, mono and multihull, and learns something new every time he steps onboard.
He has completed two westward transatlantic passages, traversed the Panama Canal, raced non-stop around Britain and Ireland and competed in two Fastnets. His ocean experience led him to write The Handbook of Survival At Sea, published in 2003.
Dick Durham - News Editor
Dick was taught how to hand, reef and steer by his father, the late Richard Stephens Durham, himself the son of a master mariner who started as a boy on a Cape Horn windjammer. As a lad Dick explored the creeks and rivers of Essex, Kent and Suffolk in a collection of dinghies and dayboats.
When he left school he signed on as mate of the Thames sailing barge Cambria and delivered the last cargo under sail alone with Bob Roberts whose biography he went on to write (The Last Sailorman). Later he wrote about passages made up to the Dutch Frisian Islands in his engineless cutter Almita for YM. He described his East Coast cruises in On & Offshore, Cruising the Thames and the East Coast. He now sails a Contessa 32, Minstrel Boy, down Channel and across to France, Belgium and Holland. On pal's boats he has cruised Brittany, the Channel Islands, across the Bay of Biscay as far as Belle Isle and up to Norway, Sweden and the Shetland Islands.
He wrote the biography of former YM editor Maurice Griffiths (The Magician of the Swatchways) and was commissioned to write the centenary history of the Sussex Yacht Club (Where the River Meets the Sea). Dick worked as a journalist in Fleet Street for 20 years before joining YM in March 2001. Married with two daughters and a son, he lives in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. Contact Dick.
Kieran Flatt - Production Editor
As a child, Kieran grew up in Southern Africa and the Cayman Islands, where he learned to sail on an elderly windsurfer. At the age of 12 he learned about ‘proper' boats (those you could sit in, rather than stand on) when he fell into the freezing-cold waters of the English Channel. He's capsized, broached and pitch-poled various dinghies - from a Laser, Merlin-Rocket, 505 and a home-made Sydney Harbour-style Skiff. Kieran began training as a naval architect but, dropped out to work a sailing instructor and bosun at Dinard Yacht Club in Brittany.
Back in Britain, he talked his way onto a succession of keelboats and racing yachts, from Darings to Sigma 38s and completed a brace of Fastnet races and a score of other offshore races. Nowadays he cruises a his long-keeled Twister sloop out of Portsmouth, sometimes as far afield as Biscay but mainly in sea areas Wight, Portland and Plymouth. He joined YM in 2007 after working as a food critic and editing a business journal for the best part of a decade.
Graham Snook - Photographer
Yachting Monthly's photographer was given an Optimist dinghy at the age of four and by the age of eight had 'stolen' his mother's camera.
Sailing and photography didn't come together until Graham saw an article in a sailing magazine about the celebrated marine photographer Kos. Inspired, he went on to study photography at college in Falmouth. After a chance meeting with a sports photographer, Graham got six weeks work experience with Allsport, one of the biggest sports picture agencies in the world and moved to London three days after graduating to work as a darkroom technician and photographic assistant. He joined YM in March 1999.
His father runs a yacht charter business in Falmouth. Click here to contact Graham.
Maxine Heath - Editorial Artist
Maxine has been sailing since 1970 and has worked at Yachting Monthly since 1979.
Early years were spent racing GP 14s, Cadets and Snipes. A period of cruising the South Coast, Channel Islands and France followed. Until recently Maxine was the co-owner of a Hunter Sonata, racing in a fleet of 24 on the River Medway. Racing successes included winning the Medway Sonata Spring Series and coming second in the Sonata Eastern Area Championships.
Maxine draws the sail and general accommodation plans for our monthly boat tests, Second Look, and One Man and His Boat, as well as for our Second Hand group focus series.
Jane Fenton - Editorial Assistant
Jane started sailing in dinghies with her father at Christchurch, near Bournemouth. She raced Enterprises and Albacores - a two-handed 15ft dinghy. She has cruised homewaters, the Med and the Caribbean and crossed the Atlantic with the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC). Jane enjoys sailing the family-owned Westerly Centaur that is kept at Christchurch.
Andrew Brook - Geoff Pack Scholar
Andrew is the latest recipient of the Geoff Pack scholarship, named after YM's former editor who died of cancer aged 39. It is a two-year bursary for aspiring sailing journalists.
Andrew, 23, from Huddersfield, has sailed since the age of 10 and spent most of his childhood dinghy racing on northern UK lakes and reservoirs. Aged 19, he was national youth champion in the GP14 class.
Seeking bigger boats and hotter climates, he qualified as a Yachtmaster in 2007 at the age of 20, and spent two summers in the Mediterranean as a flotilla engineer and a yacht instructor with Sunsail and Setsail. Andrew is also an NCTJ-qualified journalist and worked as a reporter on a local newspaper in Suffolk before joining YM.
