Somehow, and to his incredu­lity, I had never read an Arthur Ransome book when Peter Willis approached me with Good Little Ship. Nancy Blackett, the real-life ori­gin­al of the Goblin in We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea, was a famil­i­ar sight on the East Coast and clearly much…

Bob Comlay sailed with H W Tilman to Greenland – twice – while still in his teens and formed an endur­ing friend­ship with ‘the Skipper’ which las­ted until Tilman’s loss at sea in 1977. Bob was invalu­able in pulling togeth­er the new fore­words and after­words to our…

Philip Temple’s 1965 account of an out­rageously bold exped­i­tion was pub­lished without fan­fare, without many good pho­to­graphs, and without even the bene­fit of a copy-edit­or; it van­ished without trace. The Sea and The Snow came to our atten­tion a few years ago as we…

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…

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…

The Albert Strange Association (bear with me), in which I am heav­ily implic­ated, held its Annual General Meeting in Lincoln a few years ago, and our very enga­ging guest speak­er was Dr Robb Robinson, a mari­time his­tor­i­an at the University of Hull. His sub­ject was…