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…
Learning curve
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…
‘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…
‘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…
I sailed across the pacific with one hand
Having reached Bora Bora, I was about to set off on the next leg of my circumnavigation, covering the 1,850 miles to Fiji on my own. There followed a series…
A disastrous trip saw this sailor shipwrecked for the second time on the same islands… 50 years later
During the afternoon of Christmas Eve 2019, I was steering a tubby old steel ketch called Cristina on a delivery passage slowly westward along the south coast of Isla Las…