Luke Powell’s Working Sail is back!
The success of Christian Topf’s epic production From the Loft Floor to the Sea shows that interest in traditional wooden boatbuilding, and the pilot cutter as an exemplar of it, is unabated. We’ve now reissued Luke’s 2012 account of his life in wooden boats – covering the entire bevy of his earlier pilot cutters.
You can learn more and secure a copy here.
Truly, a place apart
It’s not just about the boats, but their presence is strong in the North Yorkshire fishing village of Staithes. We had a lovely weekend in November accompanying author Gloria Wilson – who was brought up here – to local signing sessions. Local historian James Stoker gave us a grand walking tour of this hardy, self-reliant, eccentric, and now much changed settlement, for which the term ‘higgledy-piggledy’ might have been invented.
Let Gloria guide you too on a stroll around the village she loves; start here.
How it all began
George Holmes was an influential figure in the design and sailing of small boats from the late nineteenth century until well into the twentieth. His prolific writings, drawings, etchings, and designs had never been collected when, in 2009, my friend Tony Watts of the Humber Yawl Club agreed to take on this task, and incorporate a biography of Holmes. The success of Holmes of the Humber, our first book, got Lodestar Books off the ground.
Holmes is finally out of print, but you can now enjoy a copy in PDF form – click here.
Like a box of jewels
Someone, somewhere wrote that George Millar was incapable of writing a dull sentence, and never was that more true than in his three books of sailing memoirs. Oyster River, set in the Morbihan in Brittany, and Isabel and the Sea, relating a voyage through the French...
A storm at sea
The night, moonless and densely clouded, had settled around us with pitchy darkness. One could not see a hand held before the eyes. Rain came down in torrents. Repeatedly it drowned the riding light, until I abandoned the attempt of relighting it. Only the binnacle...
The romance of a proper dinghy
The light north-easterly breeze continued during my watch until midnight, and Juanita sailed on through the darkness, her jib shimmering with the phosphorescence of the lee bow wave, and little Punch, the 8’ dinghy following in our glistening wake, with a...
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A quiet sense of achievement
Spring 2009: Constance is just back from her first Old Gaffers event, the annual East Coast Race weekend at Brightlingsea, where she mixed it with craft large and small, and attracted much admiration for both her looks and speed, praise which rightly belongs to her...
Too fast for accurate navigation
The year was 1955 and H W Tilman was undertaking his first 'sail to climb' expedition, aiming to cross the Patagonian ice-cap in both directions—starting from the 'other side'. This would necessitate a transit of the Magellan Strait; as Sir Robin Knox-Johnston puts it...