When we saw the race briefing it was a little bit fuzzy,’ John Quinn told me, recalling events that had happened over three decades earlier, before the start of the…
Learning curve
‘The salty water was dangerously reaching the cockpit edge and we had to prevent the boat from taking too much water’
I first saw the boat after reading a small advertisement in a local newspaper. It was lying under a red tarpaulin. The varnish was faded, the boat was full of…
‘Sometimes your boat knows best’
Zen Again was heading west for Africa. We had departed our home port of Fremantle, Western Australia in June. We visited Shark Bay, Cocos-Keeling Islands, Rodriquez, Mauritius and Reunion. Now…
‘Never before have I sailed in such wild weather’ – struck by a ‘weather bomb’ near New Zealand
Sammy, my sister, was ready to go. She couldn’t wait to put on her skipper’s hat and head off on a great adventure. It was 1998 when offshore sailing was…
‘While we were out consuming the local delicacies, a stowaway was surreptitiously finding their way aboard’
Rat in Mi Kitchen, one of the greats by UB40, proved to have a whole new meaning when sailing in Greece this year. A rodent infestation was far from my…
How to learn to sail: Catching the sailing wave
When I signed up to improve my sailing knowledge via an RYA Competent Crew course, I didn’t realise it would involve gasping at fins breaking through the water. As I…
‘We got battered by a storm that wasn’t forecast’
Although we had managed a brief visit to St Kilda, the Scottish weather during 2022 had not been great, so my wife Sarah and I pondered going somewhere warm. I…
‘My experience of the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race’
Dirty, wet and hungry; riding 30ft waves on a boat which was permanently tilted at 45°, I realised that this experience wasn’t quite what I’d been sold on that induction…
‘We suddenly heard a loud noise from the engine. We had no idea what it was and it got us worried ’
The Kiel Canal provides a convenient shortcut between the North Sea and the Baltic, or as the Germans call it, the Nordsee and the Ostsee. We Europeans call it the…
‘£10,000 and two broken engines in to my yacht purchase, I realised I may have made a mistake…’
Just about every middle-aged man dreams of buying a boat and going on a sailing adventure. The sense of freedom, the wind blowing across your balding pate without a care…