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…

Perhaps the most curi­ous craft which is found in use by the fish­er­men round the coasts of Britain is the Yorkshire coble [writes George Holmes in 1912]. Along with the Sheringham boat—referred to and described in a former number—this type is used for crab­bing by the…

Most people read­ing this have enjoyed lives markedly more com­fort­able than those of their par­ents or grand­par­ents. My own fath­er served at sea when a teen­ager dur­ing World War II, as a stoker and coal trim­mer on tramp steam­ers and later on deep-sea res­cue tugs, on…

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…

Martin O’Scannall has enjoyed a love affair of more than forty years with his 1913 gaff cut­ter Sauntress, begin­ning with her rebuild and cul­min­at­ing in the glor­ies pic­tured here. Below is his account of her sojourn in a boat­yard at Brentford on the Thames in west…

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,…