My good friend Fabian Bush built me a (-noth­er!) boat a few years ago and we launched her togeth­er in 2014 at West Mersea in Essex. Teal is named for the ‘small dab­bling duck’ in recog­ni­tion of the dir­ec­tion my sail­ing was expec­ted to take in my dot­age, and she has…

Our first book had sold out a few years before, and we had the feel­ing it was time for a new edi­tion in our now-stand­ard robust soft­cov­er format, and that there remained an unplumbed audi­ence among people who, though per­haps not habitu­al read­ers of sail­ing books,…

Charlie Stock was a sin­gu­lar sail­or, who was for sixty years a part of the scenery on his home waters of the Thames Estuary. In his last book, pub­lished posthum­ously, he describes and handles the local fea­tures and haz­ards meet­ing the small boat sail­or, not only in…

When barely six­teen I spent two months with my slightly young­er broth­er Dave hitch-hik­ing, and often rough sleep­ing, around Scotland watch­ing birds. We went as far north as the Shetland isle Fetlar to see the snowy owls which bred there, and man­aged to cadge an…

For most of my life my sail­ing was of the arm­chair kind, and in the mid-1970s much of it was in the delight­ful com­pany of Ken Duxbury, a writer whose light touch belies the skill and resource­ful­ness which under­pinned the voy­ages made by him and his wife B. in their…

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…