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…

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…

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…

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…

George Holmes’s illus­trated and often hand-writ­ten cruise accounts fre­quently appeared in the pages of the Humber Yawl Club Yearbook, and later in The Yachting Monthly. Here is a cruise he made in Denmark in 1894, and writ­ten up a few years later. He and his companion…

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…