Many years ago, I was on a family motoring holiday driving towards Brittany when, in a small town, we passed under a banner proclaiming a regatta. I was baffled: we…
Dick Durham
How to lay your own mooring
Over the years I have had deep water moorings laid for me and also dug in my own half-tide moorings. Both have been in positions which suited the craft I…
In search of the famed ship Beagle, which carried Charles Darwin to his discoveries
For several years I kept my Contessa 32, Minstrel Boy, at Paglesham on the River Roach in Essex and was a member of the Roach Cruising Association (RCA), one of…
Don’t cross the Dover Strait. It’s thick with traffic out there
Forty years ago this summer I made my first Channel crossing according to an old, delaminating, mildewed and fading logbook. It is the first logbook I ever kept because prior…
‘Everyone will miss Don, but few will miss his copy’ – Remembering a sailing writing legend
There’s a scene in the film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where outlaws Paul Newman and Robert Redford watch from a crag as the distant posse chases them. To…
Don’t let Thames sewage kill off this ancient oyster fishing boat
Samuel Pepys mentions oysters in his diaries 68 times, but that was when they were as common as winkles along the banks of the Thames and when they were a…
‘The best thing about a concrete boat? The worst ones are at the bottom of the sea’
Circumnavigator, Rob Hart, poked the glowing embers of his coal stove, set a cup of tea in front of me and said: ‘You know the best thing about a concrete…
‘Why a healthy dose of fatalism is good for you’ – Dick Durham
Nancy, my mother, drummed into me a set of lower middle-class rules, the origins and the validity of which remain, a lifetime later, lost to comprehension. Yet still I stick…
Remembering the Great Tide 70 years on
Hundreds of laid-up yachts were holed, crushed or simply dashed to kindling in the Great Tide which flooded both sides of the North Sea 70 years ago this year, drowning…
Old Man Sailing heads to France to sell his new book by hand
Sailing alone brings out a certain mastery of life which no other activity can provide. All sailors plan to eradicate obstacles, but out on the ocean they still arise and…