By March of 1954 we had enough money for me to stop work­ing and begin build­ing in the farm loft. I cleared the chick­en shit out, blocked up the gaps in the walls and lev­elled the floor. Building a small boat alone is like an exer­cise in med­it­a­tion; through­out the…

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…

Gloria Wilson has been writ­ing about, pho­to­graph­ing and draw­ing the North Sea fish­ing industry for half a cen­tury. Of her draw­ings in par­tic­u­lar she writes:In mak­ing the draw­ings, with my own pho­to­graphs for ref­er­ence, I have enjoyed a mind­ful scru­tiny of the boats…

Lodestar reg­u­lars will know that we have a soft spot for the Victorian/Edwardian ‘Renaissance Man’ Albert Strange — Yacht Designer, Sailor, Writer, Raconteur and not least Marine Artist. The Albert Strange Association, foun­ded in 1978, exists to pre­serve his…

Bob Comlay is a vet­er­an of two Tilman exped­i­tions to Greenland, and has cajoled many sail­ors, climbers and writers into con­trib­ut­ing fore­words and after­words to our new Collected Edition of Tilman, shed­ding fresh light on a fre­quently mis­un­der­stood fig­ure: I…

Tom Cunliffe writes:For fifty glor­i­ous years from the time of the 1861 Pilotage Act until the Great War nailed down the coffin lid on com­mer­cial sail, the Bristol Channel was a free-for-all for com­pet­it­ive pilot­ing. This great fun­nel of tide-swept water stood wide…