A fine idea this month, for YM to warn about The Shock Of The Big (p34). It is easy to to think that a roomier, faster, grander boat is always…

Tom Cunliffe

Have you noticed the way the world seems to spin a lot faster in the first few hours after returning from a cruise? It struck me hard when I came…

Dick Durham

There is a cartoon drawn by Mike Peyton that sticks in my mind. Two boats are sailing abeam from an anchorage in light conditions. The helmsman of the one nearest…

I wrote a novel years ago, Casting Off, in which a furious wife, at the end of a scratchy weekend a deux, watches her husband carrying his bag up the…

Tom Cunliffe

“The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land” One of my favourite quotes is from Joseph Conrad. ‘The true peace of God…

“First of all, fear helps. One hand for yourself, one for the ship” I’m glad to see, among this month’s topics, the rather vital one of how not to fall…

Dick Durham

“The ooze had swallowed my boots. I was stuck in a quagmire of East Coast mud, 300 yards offshore” It’s an isolated spot, just a few cows grazing on marshland…

Tom Cunliffe

‘Every time I sail under a bridge, I worry that I’m about to wallop it’   I once caught an innocent bystander’s VHF antenna with my topping lift when heeled…

“The commodore, presumably, would take on the role of Prime Minister” Voting time! With the new fixed-term rule, General Election day approaches with all the fearful inevitability of Low Water…

Tom Cunliffe

‘Having to brass up to lie in what have always been free anchorages is another burden on our creaking cruising budgets’ My first experience of Internet-based weather forecasting for sailors…