The long-wave shipping forecast reaches its centenary in 2024, though it’s not much of a celebration given that LW itself, ‘at the end of its life as a technology’, will…
Cruising life
‘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…
‘We were in a race against time’ – how a mad dash by these sailors prevented them being stranded
Five hours into our madcap race, we feared that we weren’t going to make it. We knew the odds were stacked against us, but we had no choice but to…
‘Crocodiles, sharks, box jellyfish, stonefish and sea-snakes’ – Sailing the northern Australian coast
The Kimberly Coast of Northern Australia has the largest tidal range in the southern hemisphere. In Derby, to the west of Darwin, the tidal range has registered as much as…
Sailing in the wake of the Vikings and attending the viking festival ‘Up Helly Aa’
There was no past. No future. Only right now. A moon spread its silver over the sea and the waves chased us along. We were on our way back to…
Cruising Guadeloupe: one couple explore a paradise teeming with natural wonders
The French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe is the most southerly of the Leeward Islands. Shaped like a butterfly, it is split into two halves, the wings forming Basse-Terre in the…
‘We spotted people in the water, fighting for their lives’
Under reefed mainsail and engine we were heading westwards, close to the rocky cliffs off the French south coast, east of Marseille. In the distance I saw something in the…
How to make your boat child-friendly
The idea of heading to sea with a child on board elicits different responses for different people, however far you’re going. A day sail with a boat full of noisy…
Decaying buildings left to be looted and destroyed by visitors
The quarantine officer wished us a hearty, ‘Welcome to ‘Straya!’ Clearance into Mackay on Australia’s Queensland Coast was straightforward except for the fiscal shock we received when he informed us…
Exploring Ireland’s wild Atlantic coast by boat
From a distance the Skellig Islands look like two shards of rock sticking out of the Atlantic. Skellig or Sceilg means ‘splinter of stone’. It was a calm, hot and…